As one of the world’s rarest mammals, the iconic echidna has developed surprising ways to adapt to a warming climate.
As one of the world’s rarest mammals, the iconic echidna has developed surprising ways to adapt to a warming climate.
In this episode, David Karsten was joined by Dr Christine Cooper from Curtin’s School of Molecular and Life Sciences to discuss the unique traits of echidnas and what the future holds.
What is a monotreme? 01:30
Dr Cooper explains how echidnas use vocalisations to mate [8:05]
The differences between echidnas across the country [14:09]
How echidnas survive in extreme heat [22:03]
Curtin study suggests rare echidna noises could be the ‘language of love’
Study finds blowing bubbles among echidna’s tricks to beat the heat
Dr Christine Cooper, School of Molecular and Life Sciences, Curtin University
Christine Cooper is an expert in vertebrate ecophysiology. She completed her PhD in zoology at UWA, focusing on numbat physiology and behaviour. Since becoming a lecturer at Curtin in 2005, Christine splits her time between teaching, supervising research projects, and studying Australian birds and mammals. She has established extensive collaborative networks nationally and internationally, and maintains strong links with wildlife and conservation organisations.
This podcast is brought to you by Curtin University. Curtin is a global university known for its commitment to making positive change happen through high-impact research, strong industry partnerships and practical teaching.
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Host: David Karsten
Content creator: Anne Griffin-Appadoo
Producer and Recordist: Emilia Jolakoska
Social Media: Amy Hosking
Executive Producers: Anita Shore
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00:00:00:00 - 00:00:30:01
David Karsten
This is the future of, where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping shape it for the better. I'm David Karsten. Small and sturdy and covered in quills. The short beaked echidna is one of Australia's most recognizable and iconic animals. Combining both reptilian and mammalian traits, the echidna belongs to a rare group of mammals known as Monotremes, famous for laying eggs instead of birthing live young.
00:00:30:03 - 00:00:52:15
David Karsten
In this episode, I was joined by Dr. Christine Cooper from Curtin's School of Molecular and Life Sciences. We unpacked her rare recordings of Echidna communication, their impact on scientific debate, and discussed whether Echidnas can adapt to climate change by blowing bubbles. If you'd like to find out more about this research, you can visit the links provided in the show notes.
00:00:52:17 - 00:01:13:20
David Karsten
So, Dr. Cooper, tell me this this fascination with echidnas. Did it begin after your PhD or was it something that came with you through childhood that you just had to pursue?
I worked on numbats it for my Ph.D. research, and they are also a termitarous marsupial so they only eat termites, and the study site is where I also work on echidnas now.
00:01:13:20 - 00:01:30:07
Dr. Christine Cooper
And so when I was working on the numbats, I noticed that therebir were a lot of echidnas around. And because they also feed on ants and termites, they were the obvious transition to move on to. So it just sort of came from being out in the field and seeing them around and being interested in animals that have dietary specializations.
00:01:30:07 - 00:01:51:18
Dr. Christine Cooper
And that led to working with the other termitarous mammals.
David Karsten
They such an object of fascination in the mainstream because for most of us they almost defy categorization. Can you help us there? What is a monitoring? So monitoring. So a group of mammals that lay eggs. So that's really did a really amazing defining character. So it's really unusual for mammals.
00:01:51:18 - 00:02:12:02
Dr. Christine Cooper
Lay eggs. Most mammals give birth to live young, but monitoring said platypus in the echidnas lay eggs and they have some other unusual anatomical features. So some of their skeletal features are partly reptilian and they have a different physiology. So they have very low body temperatures or metabolic rates as well. It's almost a bit Frankenstein-ish really, isn't it?
00:02:12:02 - 00:02:30:00
David Karsten
The echidna? It's it's it seems to be a combination of so many different characteristics. I mean, how have you got to know the echidna over all of these years and how do you how do you define it now that you've spent so much time with this this amazing mammal?
Dr. Christine Cooper
For me, I tend to take them for granted a little bit because I spend so much time with them and I see them so much that they're normal.
00:02:30:00 - 00:02:52:14
Dr. Christine Cooper
And I guess that's one of the things of working in Australia is the monotremes in the marsupials, which are just so special, we tend to take for granted because they're our day to day study species. The animals that we see around say we do tend to take these really special mammals for granted.
David Karsten
You mentioned you completed your Ph.D. on numbats and that you encountered echidnas in the same sort of area.
00:02:52:16 - 00:03:16:05
David Karsten
Where is that location exactly where is your sample study of both?
And again, so a lot of my research is at Dryandra Woodland, which is now a national park and it's near Narrogin, So about 170 kilometers south west of Perth, south east, southeast.
David Karsten
And and how would you describe the populations? How does the social structure actually work for your average echidna?
00:03:16:07 - 00:03:36:04
Dr. Christine Cooper
So echidnas are theoretically solitary. They're supposed to be on their own, but we do find that they actually are a lot more social than what you would expect. So they do forage by themselves. But when they retreat to logs or caves or burrows, they do tend to be together. And we had some animals here in the lab in captivity, and we found that they would tend to cluster together.
00:03:36:08 - 00:03:47:22
Dr. Christine Cooper
So we would give them lots of different places that they could hide and rest, and they would tend to all try and cram into the same place. And it wasn't always that one place. It wasn't like they had a preferred place they wanted to be. It would be a different place. But if one was there, they wanted to be together.
00:03:47:22 - 00:04:11:14
Dr. Christine Cooper
So we think they're a lot more social than what they're supposed to be.
David Karsten
So what is the life cycle like for a fork for any kidnap? How old are they? Very long live so they can live up to 40 years. And for the females, other minute opportunities to lay a new litter.
Dr. Christine Cooper
So they will have one young at a time and they'll have that young maybe every two years.
00:04:11:16 - 00:04:32:10
Dr. Christine Cooper
So they do the live slow, live long strategy. Right?
Right until they're 40. Are they are they productive?
Dr. Christine Cooper
I don't know how long they will actually reproduce for. So particularly in the wild, it's it's difficult to know because they're very hard to age. They don't have teeth. So we can't easily age animals. So we only really know the age of animals that have been held in captivity.
00:04:32:10 - 00:04:55:03
Dr. Christine Cooper
So for wild animals, you need to tell it they're juvenile. The smaller they're an adult, but once they're an adult, they're really difficult to age. So we don't know how old most of our research animals are.
David Karsten
So in the wild, what is their foraging range and how far do they range in that dry Andhra National Park?
Dr. Christine Cooper
So some of them will move from a couple hundred meters to a couple of kilometers.
00:04:55:03 - 00:05:15:01
Dr. Christine Cooper
So the males tend to move a lot further, particularly in breeding season when they're looking for females. And so they will have the bigger ranges, but generally a few hundred meters and they're quite territorial. They have high ranges but not territory. So they don't defend an area, but they definitely have high ranges that they sent to stay inside, but they don't defend that from others.
00:05:15:06 - 00:05:43:18
Dr. Christine Cooper
They overlap. So different individuals will have overlapping high ranges.
David Karsten
Now you've studied some very specific characteristics of these these amazing animals. Can you define what it is that you've been looking at, I guess most recently? I mean, let's let's let's start with the calling apparatus or behaviors that they're displaying that you've actually kind of say discovered.
Dr. Christine Cooper
And so one of the issues with echidnas, it's always been believed that they're really sensitive to high temperatures.
00:05:43:18 - 00:06:02:01
Dr. Christine Cooper
So they have low body temperatures, which means they don't have a lot of scope for becoming hot. So they've always been thought that if they get to high ambient temperatures, they just cannot cope and they have pretty low lethal temperatures that my student was doing some research in the lab and we had echidnas, you know, metabolic chamber exposed to different ambient temperatures.
00:06:02:01 - 00:06:18:22
Dr. Christine Cooper
And when temperatures got warmer, she noticed that they tended to blow bubbles from the nose. And so we thought, maybe this is a cooling mechanism because I have a big blood sinus on the tip of their snout. And we thought that perhaps when they blow these mucus bubbles, the mucus this over the sinus which it and then as it evaporates, it would cause the blood.
00:06:18:24 - 00:06:36:06
Dr. Christine Cooper
So we sort of thought about this for a long time, and this was her observation. And then several years later, we were in the field and we had access to a thermal imaging camera. So we decided to go out and simply image the echidnas in the field to see if their nose really was cold compared to the rest of their body and say, keep it moist.
00:06:36:11 - 00:07:02:19
Dr. Christine Cooper
And that noise essentially works as a light and it evaporates water, which will cool the blood. But that's so fascinating. Is this another element of I guess, that adds to the to the legend of the echidna really is being such a mysterious and wonderful mix of different characteristics. I'd imagine that that that particular characteristic is quite useful in possibly a warming climate.
00:07:02:21 - 00:07:21:09
Dr. Christine Cooper
Yes. So this means that, well, firstly, they are much more robust to higher temperatures than what we ever thought. So we found them active out and about at temperatures that were higher than what they're supposed to be lethal. And these animals were while they were choosing to come out and they were out and about doing their thing, looking happy and healthy at temperatures that they should have been dead at.
00:07:21:11 - 00:07:44:10
Dr. Christine Cooper
So that was fantastic to see. And this gives us another mechanism by which they can improve their heat loss. They can also do other things so they behaviorally avoid high temperatures if they can and they can increase their general of effort of water loss. They just increase their skin permeability to water vapor. So the cooling of the evaporation reduce the temperature and then the bubble blowing is another mechanism they can use.
00:07:44:16 - 00:08:05:06
Dr. Christine Cooper
They really have adapted well to what can be a fairly harsh and unforgiving climate, especially at the height of summer. Yes, which is not really surprising because they have a really broad geographic distribution. So they found in all climates all over Australia, including the desert. So it's hard to imagine that a species that lives in these environments wouldn't have mechanisms to be able to deal with these high temperatures because behavior will get them so far.
00:08:05:08 - 00:08:40:24
Dr. Christine Cooper
But there are points where, you know, you're in a hollow log and it's going to be hot. So other researchers have measured temperatures in their logs and they're over 40 degrees. So they clearly have to be able to deal with these temperatures. So our works showing a mechanism by which they can do this.
David Karsten
You spoke before about how they are fairly solitary, except, of course, when it's mating season, that's when you've noticed also that they become a little bit more vocal and then the rest of the time, are you following through with that that vocalization and and how and how they actually communicate?
00:08:41:01 - 00:09:03:17
Dr. Christine Cooper
So that's something we'd really like to look into. So now that we know for certain that they do vocalize, we'd like to understand what these vocalize vocalizations actually mean, the context that they used in who's vocalizing to really understand more about their social interactions.
David Karsten
What have you seen and heard out in the field?
Dr. Christine Cooper
So we've accidentally come across these vocalizations.
00:09:03:17 - 00:09:24:24
Dr. Christine Cooper
So the original time that we heard it, I was out in the field helping one of my PhD students and we were doing a different study on the echidnas, and we walked up to the extent that we'd been radio tracking and he was actually in a mating train. So there was a female and another number of other males there, and he was in that train and we heard him vocalize then and we were really surprised was the first time we'd ever heard this vocalization.
00:09:25:01 - 00:09:50:01
Dr. Christine Cooper
And then the same individual. A couple of weeks later, I was out with a colleague radio tracking again, and we he was on his own. And when we picked him up to change his transmitter, he vocalized again. And then we didn't hear it for a very long time, years, maybe 15 years. And the BBC was doing some work here and they had some remote cameras set up and they happened to get some echidnas vocalizing on that.
00:09:50:01 - 00:10:12:12
Dr. Christine Cooper
And we also heard another individual vocalizing when we were handling it.
David Karsten
How would you describe the sound?
Dr. Christine Cooper
It sounds like a dove cooing is how I would describe it. Other people have described as a purr, but to me it sounds like a cooing dove.
David Karsten
You mentioned something before that which sort of highlights the lack of knowledge I have about echidnas when they get amorous.
00:10:12:12 - 00:10:30:11
David Karsten
Can you describe in a little more detail what a in a kid in a train is all about?
Dr. Christine Cooper
So if you have a female that is in breeding condition, males will come, it will compete to breed with her. And so you end up with this line of a echidnas moving around. So the female will walk around and the males will follow along behind in a line.
00:10:30:13 - 00:10:50:04
Dr. Christine Cooper
And they're obviously competing to be the ones that mate. And we don't really understand who gets to mate and how this is decided. But it may be just the male that at last or the others or happens to be closest to the female when she decides it's time. We didn't really understand how that determined. But they certainly try and follow the female around and keep as close to her as they can.
00:10:50:06 - 00:11:12:10
David Karsten
So from your observations, you can't actually see anything specific happening. It's it just when it happens, it happens.
Dr. Christine Cooper
I haven't ever observed mating myself. I've seen footage that other people have had, but I haven't actually seen. I've seen them walking around in their trains, but I haven't actually observed the mating.
David Karsten
Your studies have been quite extensive outside of the areas that you've already discussed with us.
00:11:12:10 - 00:11:43:21
David Karsten
Dr. Cooper. But back back in 2016, you were exploring the locomotor biomechanics of of an echidna, How it moves, can you define in more detail what that's all about and what your study revealed there?
Dr. Christine Cooper
So we were really interested in how echidnas move around because they do have some of those more reptilian features of their skeleton. So we were interested to see what that meant for their locomotion and then also look at some of the ecological consequences of them moving around.
00:11:44:02 - 00:11:58:23
Dr. Christine Cooper
So we were able to look at things like stride right and stride length and how they walk. But we were also interested in what that translated into in terms of the impacts they might have in their environments through how much time they were active, how much homo digging and what that might do to the soils in their environment.
00:11:59:00 - 00:12:23:06
David Karsten
What did you find out about their behavior and their movement?
Dr. Christine Cooper
So they have limited locomotor ability and they can't really run fast, but you don't need to run fast if no one can eat you because they're very spiny, they have armor. So there's a trade off between how powerful your limbs are and how quickly you can move. So if you're a digging mammal, I think that I had to dig for their food and they dig for defense, then they have to have really short, powerful limbs.
00:12:23:08 - 00:12:39:14
Dr. Christine Cooper
They're not very good for running fast because if you want to run fast, you have long, thin limbs. So they've traded off speed for strength. And by doing that, they have their armor. They can't really they have a lot defense from predators. And then they can have those powerful limbs that allow them to dig. But that means that they don't move very quickly.
00:12:39:16 - 00:13:00:05
David Karsten
Are they vulnerable to a specific predator if they are, you know, well-armed against or well-defended against most? Do they have a vulnerability?
Dr. Christine Cooper
So they're less vulnerable than a lot of our species. And that's probably why they still remain as one of the more widespread of our native mammals. But they can be vulnerable to cats and foxes and birds of prey.
00:13:00:05 - 00:13:24:08
Dr. Christine Cooper
And I think particularly on Kangaroo Island, feral cats have been a problem for their echidna population, but they certainly have a better defense than than so many of our other species.
David Karsten
When are they most active? They're mostly nocturnal. They're probably one of our most diurnal species, but even then they're mostly nocturnal, particularly in the summertime. So winter time is when you're most likely to see them out and about through the daytime evenings and then through the summer.
00:13:24:08 - 00:13:48:12
Dr. Christine Cooper
Definitely at night.
David Karsten
We talk about feral cats and the like. What and the fact that the echidnas actually spread around the country and found in many different sort of ecologies and climates, are they endangered at all? What is what is their status?
Dr. Christine Cooper
Their official conservation status is concerned. So they're one of the species that we're not particularly worried about at the moment.
00:13:48:12 - 00:14:09:13
Dr. Christine Cooper
But there are some populations that we're more concerned about so that Kangaroo Island population, for example, is not doing particularly well. But in most places echidnas are doing better than so many of our other species, and that's probably because of the armored defense. So feral predators are a real problem for so many of our species, whereas echidnas at least have some form of defense against that.
00:14:09:15 - 00:14:31:08
David Karsten
You talk about them being found in vastly different climates around the country. Do they display different characteristics at all?
Dr. Christine Cooper
Yes, echidnas are really different over Australia, and we actually only recognize one single species. But there are different subspecies recognize and they have differences in their anatomy, in their behavior, in their physiology. So they can be really quite different.
00:14:31:08 - 00:14:52:02
Dr. Christine Cooper
See, one really good example would be the Tasmanian echidnas, which tend to have lots of fur and very few spines compared to the West Australian echidnas, which have very little fur and lots of spines. So there are quite a big regional differences between the subspecies and do they different size at all across those different climates? The Tasmanian echidnas maybe a little bit bigger.
00:14:52:08 - 00:15:16:11
Dr. Christine Cooper
There's often what we call Bergman's rule, where mammals from colder climates tend to be larger than mammals from warmer climates because of the heat exchange, the physics of heat exchange and echidnas, there's probably a small effect of that, but it's not spectacular in terms of the life cycle of an echidna.
David Karsten
How long is it before a female will lay right?
00:15:16:14 - 00:15:40:18
David Karsten
And then how long does the female actually look after the young before the young is independent?
Dr. Christine Cooper
I will admit I'm not a reproductive biologist at all, so I don't really study reproduction a lot, but I'm not sure what age that they're considered adult, but they have the young dependent for about a year. I think it is. They can only produce a young about every second year.
00:15:40:20 - 00:16:02:22
David Karsten
What are you studying at the moment?
Dr. Christine Cooper
At the moment we're sort of still working up some of our existing data for echidnas, so we have a lot of data looking at where they're going and when and relating that to temperature and body temperature and movement and climatic conditions. And we've got some more accelerometer data looking at when they're active.
00:16:02:22 - 00:16:29:06
Dr. Christine Cooper
And we've got data for their their temperature on their backs as well. So we can look at do they move when they get into solar radiation, those sorts of questions. And I'd really like to get out there and do some work on their social structure. So looking at what those vocalizations we recorded actually, mean.
David Karsten
Just on that, your work here at Curtin has, I guess you've influenced many cohorts of of researchers coming through.
00:16:29:10 - 00:16:53:16
David Karsten
Do you have time to get out there in the field as much as you used to?
Dr. Christine Cooper
Yes, I really enjoy getting my hands dirty in the lab and in the field, so I make sure that I have time in my schedule, even if it's nights and weekends where I actually get to run experiments myself as well. So, yes, obviously we train students and we work closely with honors and masses and students, but it's really important to me to also actually be out in the field and doing experiments myself as well.
00:16:53:18 - 00:17:16:04
David Karsten
Is the field of Echidna research. Is that is it is it fairly well populated in terms of researchers with your skill set and and your experience, or are you one of only a few in the world that are that are dedicating, I guess, their research to this particular species?
Dr. Christine Cooper
They're probably one of our better studied mammals because they are so widely distributed and they are so accessible.
00:17:16:10 - 00:17:34:16
Dr. Christine Cooper
So we certainly have more people having the opportunity to work on echidnas and a lot of other species which are only found in really isolated areas. So yes, we definitely have several researchers in Australia who have worked on the kidneys a lot. So your your ambition for the next few years is to get an understanding of the vocalizations.
00:17:34:16 - 00:18:02:15
David Karsten
Are there other parts of the, I guess, the echidna lifecycle or it can do research that really is crying out for for a better depth of understanding.
Dr. Christine Cooper
So I'm a physiologist, so I have a bit of a preoccupation with temperature and energy and water. So what I'd really like to do is look at some of the social behavior and interactions and relate that to temperature and food availability and body temperature.
00:18:02:19 - 00:18:29:19
Dr. Christine Cooper
And so look at sort of that interaction between the environment, the physiology and the social interactions.
David Karsten
I guess what I'm also asking is whether or not there's a fair bit of collaboration or complementary research going on where you and your contemporaries are discussing each other's work. And and are you aware of other exciting leaps forward that are being made in the field of Echidna research?
00:18:29:23 - 00:18:51:24
Dr. Christine Cooper
Yes. So everyone in Australia is especially mammal research is pretty collaborative. So for example, a lot of the work we did, we collaborated with Stuart Nicol from University of Tasmania, who has worked on kidneys for 40 odd years. And so and the student that I first had the vocalizations with, she was actually co supervised by me, by a colleague at WA and by Stuart in Tasmania.
00:18:52:04 - 00:19:19:00
Dr. Christine Cooper
So yeah, so we certainly do collaborate on, on those research projects.
David Karsten
What, what needs to happen with regards to Echidna research say over the next 20, 30 years, in your opinion, that will really round out the research required to conserve and better understand these, these mammals going forward.
Dr. Christine Cooper
So something that would be really interesting to look at is how plastic they are in their responses to things like climate change.
00:19:19:02 - 00:19:40:02
Dr. Christine Cooper
So we understand that there's differences in the different subspecies with respect to physiological variables like water loss and conductance and energy use. But how variable can a particular population be? So that would be a really interesting question is what sort of capacity do they have to acclimate to different conditions and what capacity do they have to adapt to different conditions?
00:19:40:03 - 00:20:03:15
Dr. Christine Cooper
That's a really difficult question to ask for. A really long lived big animal like in the echidna. So that's one of the challenges. But I think that's one of the challenges for comparative physiologists in general, is we do we tend to understand the geographic patterns and differences, but what we don't understand very well is how animals can change their physiology in response to changing climate.
David Karsten
There is no chance that your work will run out in your lifetime, is what you're saying.
00:20:03:15 - 00:20:23:15
Dr. Christine Cooper
Christine no, no. There's certainly more things to look at than we have the time and money to do.
David Karsten
Christine, The other thing I wanted to ask you was it was your your hobby outside of your research actually takes you back into the field anyway. Can you talk to us a little bit about what you enjoy doing in your and I'll use air quotes here.
00:20:23:15 - 00:20:52:20
David Karsten
You're off time.
Dr. Christine Cooper
Like, like most biologists, I enjoy photography, I enjoy bushwalking, I enjoy birdwatching. So I guess most biologists, they and they end up becoming biologists because they already have interest in those sorts of things. And so, yes, in our spare time, that's what we're doing. We're out there camping and bushwalking and taking photographs and birdwatching. And for fun,
David Karsten
Have you ever managed to capture some amazing behavior or just just just an incredible moment with your camera?
00:20:52:22 - 00:21:24:10
Dr. Christine Cooper
I'm not a particularly good photographer. I'm a very enthusiastic photographer of that. No, I haven't taken amazing pictures, but I get some reasonable look at the pictures. But they're not they're not incredible.
David Karsten
We're about to go into exam time. Are you, particularly with the researchers or postdoctoral research is coming through? Are you hopeful for the future in terms of the Echidna research going into the decades after your career is over?
00:21:24:12 - 00:21:41:23
Dr. Christine Cooper
Yes, I think there's always going to be that interest there, particularly if you work on iconic mammals. There are always going to be people who are really interested in that area. And then we're so fortunate here that we have access to all these amazing iconic animals and fantastic study sites that we can get out in the field and work on them.
00:21:42:00 - 00:22:03:15
Dr. Christine Cooper
So we're very, very fortunate here in Australia that we have those natural systems that we can study, but that comes also with a responsibility to provide that information for the conservation as well.
David Karsten
Are you encouraged by the cohort that's so coming through now?
Dr. Christine Cooper
Yeah, it's great to see some of our students here setting units and showing an interest in in these areas.
00:22:03:17 - 00:22:34:00
David Karsten
Christine the capability of echidna to live in all sorts of conditions all over the country means that it can survive extremes of temperature, especially at the height of summer. Now, fire is a big part of must be a big part of an extended life cycle. How do they cope in that extreme sort of condition?
Dr. Christine Cooper
So we did some research looking at how echidnas might ease hibernation to survive extreme events like fires.
00:22:34:00 - 00:22:53:16
Dr. Christine Cooper
So we were able to go out to our study site and put pieces and transmitters and body temperature loggers on echidnas in an area that was going to be subject to a controlled burn and a control site that wasn't going to be burnt. And we monitored both groups before the controlled burn and then DBCA carried out the controlled burn.
00:22:53:16 - 00:23:15:01
Dr. Christine Cooper
And then we monitored how the animals responded to that and we were able to show that echidnas in the burnt site use a lot more hibernation to reduce their activity after the fire. So by going down and becoming inactive and cold and sleeping a whole lot, they reduced the energy requirements so they were able to survive in a post-fire landscape where there were less resources.
00:23:15:03 - 00:23:36:02
Dr. Christine Cooper
And by using that hibernation strategy to be inactive.
David Karsten
What I want to know is how about during the fire itself? What are some of their strategies to avoid? I don't know, burning up.
Dr. Christine Cooper
So there's two options. They either hunker down in a retreat and hope for the best or they actually and some event animals use both strategies and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.
00:23:36:02 - 00:23:53:00
Dr. Christine Cooper
So we actually had two animals in the same log at the same time. One animal fleet, the other side, and the one who stayed ended up perishing in the fire. So they have to make that decision about how secure their retreat is and whether it's a better option to stay and hang in there and hope for the best or to flee.
00:23:53:06 - 00:24:13:01
Dr. Christine Cooper
And in that situation, one of our research animals actually made the right decision and the other didn't make the right decision. It's a little digging legs, we're scurrying along and we went there, too. So we instrument animals and we obviously weren't there during the burn that wasn't safe, but we were able to go back afterwards and radio tracked the animals to find where where they'd gone.
00:24:13:01 - 00:24:38:03
Dr. Christine Cooper
And we can tell from their GPS where they were at the time of the fire. So when you say a post-fire context, a post-fire landscape would mean obviously less food available. And that's why you're saying reducing activity requires less energy, obviously, right? Yes. Yes. So once the area has been burnt, then there's a lot of less logs and decaying matter for the termites and the area's been burnt.
00:24:38:03 - 00:24:56:24
Dr. Christine Cooper
So all that stuff shows that this termites will not be there for a period of time. So if they can just stay somewhere and go into hibernation and not come out, reduce their activity, then they're reducing their feed requirements and they're also reducing the activity in an area that now is quite open and exposed. So they're reducing their vulnerability to predation as well.
00:24:57:01 - 00:25:21:23
David Karsten
Christine, you're a scientist. You've offered up a very analytical overview of of the echidna. But tell me at the very least, when you spend so much time with them in the field, does it become personal? Do you have names for some of the populations that you're with, some of the opinions of the populations that you've been studying?
Dr. Christine Cooper
Sometimes we name them with actual names, and sometimes we use numbers or codes for naming them.
00:25:21:23 - 00:25:37:01
Dr. Christine Cooper
So it depends who I'm working with and what the attitudes and races are very strict about. You don't name your animals and others find it easier to name them. I'm pretty flexible. I go either way with it. And so really depending. So we need to have, you know, B1, B2, B3 or we actually give them names at the time.
00:25:37:03 - 00:25:57:04
Dr. Christine Cooper
To me it doesn't really make the difference. So the number becomes a name anyway, and whether you name them or not. But yeah, you certainly get to know certain individuals, you get frustrated by some, and you grow to love others, so you just do tend to have quite different personalities. So some are very timid and shy and some are really quite outgoing and adventurous.
00:25:57:04 - 00:26:11:14
Dr. Christine Cooper
So even if you just find in echidnas, some of them, if you stand very quietly, they'll just hunker down on the ground digging and they just won't move for hours. Others totally ignore you. I've even had them climb over me when I've been lying on the ground trying to get a fight. So it really depends. They're quite different in their personality.
00:26:11:16 - 00:26:41:08
David Karsten
You've devoted much of your career to this animal. Are you still deriving the same sort of satisfaction out of them professionally? And and yet, do you is it still rewarding for you?
Dr. Christine Cooper
It is always fantastic to see animals in the wild. I mean, the one good thing about being a comparative physiologist is I get to work on a whole lot of different species and echidnas are just one of those species, but they certainly something that I really enjoy working on, Christine, is it's been fascinating.
00:26:41:08 - 00:27:00:21
David Karsten
Thank you so much for chatting with us today.
Dr. Christine Cooper
Thank you for having me.
David Karsten
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