[Animals] 'Mini kangaroos on steroids' make comeback in South Australia after disappearing for 100 years

[BirSaNN]

The tiny marsupials have a penchant for peanut butter, which researchers have used to help them monitor and conduct health checks on the po[CENSORED]tion.

Adorable marsupials that look like "mini kangaroos on steroids" are bouncing back in southern Australia after disappearing from the region for more than 100 years.

Brush-tailed bettongs (Bettongia penicillata), also known as yalgiri in the language of the local Narungga People, are energetic creatures that once hopped and darted across much of the Australian mainland. Over the last two centuries, their numbers have dwindled due to predation by foxes and feral cats, as well as habitat loss. Now only a few thousand survive in pockets of Western Australia, in sanctuaries and on islands. But recently, the mini marsupials have made a comeback in the south after being reintroduced by conservationists.

"They're like a little, ankle-sized kangaroo — a mini kangaroo on steroids if you like," Derek Sandow, an ecologist with the Northern and Yorke Landscape Board in South Australia, told the French News Agency (AFP). "They've got really powerful hind legs, they carry their young in their pouch, like a kangaroo does, but they're only a kilo and a half (three pounds)."

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Sandow is part of a team of wildlife researchers that have tagged and reintroduced 120 brush-tailed bettongs to the Yorke Peninsula, near Adelaide, since August 2021, in the hope that the po[CENSORED]tion might recover. The new arrivals were translocated from nearby Wedge Island and from the Upper Warren region of Western Australia and the latest release was coordinated with Noongar and Narungga Traditional Owners, according to WWF Australia.

"On the southern Yorke peninsula, we've actually got geography on our side," Sandow told ABC Radio Adelaide. "We've got a foot-shaped peninsula, ocean on three sides. We've built a predator management fence across the ankle, just to slow the movement of foxes and cats, but we're operating in a working landscape, so there's towns and farms, and we're trying to demonstrate that with a reduction of these threats, we can actually bring back these really vulnerable native species."

link: https://www.livescience.com/animals/land-mammals/mini-kangaroos-on-steroids-make-comeback-in-south-australia-after-disappearing-for-100-years