Pig-footed Bandicoot - Extinction

Extinction

According to Indigenous Australian oral tradition this species was rare even before the arrival of Europeans on the continent and was in a serious decline even as it first came to scientific notice in the middle years of the 19th century. Two specimens of pig-footed bandicoot were obtained by local people in 1857 for Gerard Krefft, who accompanied the Blandowski Expedition. Despite the trouble taken in gaining living specimens, Krefft recorded his observations with an apology for eating one of them. Only a handful of specimens were collected through the second part of the 19th century, mostly from northwestern Victoria, but also from arid country in South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory. By the start of the 20th century, it had become extinct in Victoria and the south-west of Western Australia. The last certain specimen was collected in 1901. By 1945 the species vanished form South Australia and was reported to be limited to "a slight foothold in central Australia". Nevertheless, Aboriginal people report that it survived as late as the 1950s in the Gibson Desert and the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia.

The cause of the extinction remains uncertain: neither of the two most destructive introduced exterminator species, the fox and the rabbit, had yet arrived in south-west Western Australia when the pig-footed bandicoot disappeared from that area. Feral cats were already common, which may offer an explanation; it is perhaps more likely that the decline was caused by a double habitat change. Firstly, the end of many thousands of years of Aboriginal burning which, being confined to a patchwork of small areas at any one time, had ensured both fresh new growth in the recently burnt areas and adjacent older growth for shelter and as a base for recolonisation. However, Australia's Aboriginal population had declined by around 90% during the 19th century, largely because of the introduction of European diseases, and the remaining Aborigines were often no longer permitted to carry on their traditional land-management and hunting practices. Secondly, following on the heels of the near-extermination of the Aborigines, came the introduction of vast numbers of sheep and cattle, leading to significant changes in soil structure, plant growth, and food availability.