Olfactory misinformation provides refuge to palatable plants from mammalian browsing.

Mammalian herbivores browse palatable plants of ecological and economical value. Undesirable neighbours can reduce browsing to these plants by providing 'associational refuge', but they can also compete for resources. Here we recreated the informative odour emitted by undesirable plants.

Grow up, be persistent, and stay focused: keys for solving foraging problems by free-ranging possums.

Individuals within a species often vary in both their problem-solving approach and ability, affecting their capacity to access novel food resources. Testing problem-solving in free-ranging individuals is crucial for understanding the fundamental ecological implications of problem-solving capacity. To examine the factors affecting problem-solving in free-ranging animals, we presented three food-extraction tasks of increasing difficulty to urban common brushtail possums ().

To eat, or not to eat: a phantom decoy affects information-gathering behavior by a free-ranging mammalian herbivore.

When foraging, making appropriate food choices is crucial to an animal's fitness. Classic foraging ecology theories assume animals choose food of greatest benefit based on their absolute value across multiple dimensions. Consequently, poorer options are considered irrelevant alternatives that should not influence decision-making among better options.

The ethics of intervening in animal behaviour for conservation.

Conservation behaviour is a growing field that applies insights from the study of animal behaviour to address challenges in wildlife conservation and management. Conservation behaviour interventions often aim to manage specific behaviours of a species to solve conservation challenges. The field is often viewed as offering approaches that are less intrusive or harmful to animals than, for example, managing the impact of a problematic species by reducing its population size (frequently through lethal control).

A new conceptual and quantitative approach to exploring and defining potential open-access olfactory information.

All organisms emit odour, providing 'open-access' olfactory information for any receiver with the right sensory apparatus. Characterizing open-access information emitted by groups of organisms, such as plant species, provides the means to answer significant questions about ecological interactions and their evolution. We present a new conceptual framework defining information reliability and a practical method to characterize and recover information from amongst olfactory noise.

Haemoprotozoan surveillance in peri-urban native and introduced wildlife from Australia.

Vector-borne haemoprotozoans comprise a diverse group of eukaryote single-celled organisms transmitted by haematophagous (blood-feeding) invertebrates. They can cause debilitating diseases that impact wildlife, livestock, companion animals and humans. Recent research has shown that Australian wildlife host a diverse range of haemoprotozoan species; however, to date this work has primarily been confined to a few host species or isolated populations in rural habitats.

The bacterial biome of ticks and their wildlife hosts at the urban-wildland interface.

Advances in sequencing technologies have revealed the complex and diverse microbial communities present in ticks (Ixodida). As obligate blood-feeding arthropods, ticks are responsible for a number of infectious diseases that can affect humans, livestock, domestic animals and wildlife. While cases of human tick-borne diseases continue to increase in the northern hemisphere, there has been relatively little recognition of zoonotic tick-borne pathogens in Australia.

Behavioural drivers of survey bias: interactive effects of personality, the perceived risk and device properties.

Detecting small mammal species for wildlife research and management typically depends on animals deciding to engage with a device, for instance, by entering a trap. While some animals engage and are detected, others do not, and we often lack a mechanistic understanding of what drives these decisions. As trappability can be influenced by traits of personality, personality has high potential to similarly influence detection success for non-capture devices (chew-track cards, tracking tunnels, etc.

Misinformation tactics protect rare birds from problem predators.

Efficient decision-making integrates previous experience with new information. Tactical use of misinformation can alter choice in humans. Whether misinformation affects decision-making in other free-living species, including problem species, is unknown.

A mechanistic understanding of prebaiting to improve interaction with wildlife management devices.

Background: Prebaiting is a technique involving early deployment of 'unarmed' devices (e.g. baits and traps) to increase efficacy of wildlife management.

Testing transgenerational transfer of personality in managed wildlife populations: a house mouse control experiment.

Pest species control operations are most effective if every individual in a population is targeted. Yet, individual personality drives variation in animal responses to devices such as traps and baits. Failing to account for differences in behavior during control operations may drive a selective removal, resulting in residual animals with biased expressions of personality.

Leveraging Motivations, Personality, and Sensory Cues for Vertebrate Pest Management.

Managing vertebrate pests is a global conservation challenge given their undesirable socio-ecological impacts. Pest management often focuses on the 'average' individual, neglecting individual-level behavioural variation ('personalities') and differences in life histories. These differences affect pest impacts and modify attraction to, or avoidance of, sensory cues.

Invasive rabbits host immature Ixodes ticks at the urban-forest interface.

Introduced wildlife may be important alternative hosts for generalist ticks that cause health issues for humans and companion animals in urban areas, but to date are rarely considered as part of the tick-host community compared to native wildlife. In Australia, European rabbits, Oryctolagus cuniculus, are a widespread and abundant invasive species common to a range of human-modified ecosystems. To understand the potential role of rabbits in the life cycle of Australian ticks, we investigated the seasonal abundance of all tick life stages (larva, nymph, and adult) on rabbits collected from pest control programs in two urban forest remnants in Sydney, Australia.

Molecular identification of the Trypanosoma (Herpetosoma) lewisi clade in black rats (Rattus rattus) from Australia.

Invasive rodent species are known hosts for a diverse range of infectious microorganisms and have long been associated with the spread of disease globally. The present study describes molecular evidence for the presence of a Trypanosoma sp. from black rats (Rattus rattus) in northern Sydney, Australia.

Bacterial community profiling highlights complex diversity and novel organisms in wildlife ticks.

Ticks Acari:Ixodida transmit a greater variety of pathogens than any other blood-feeding group of arthropods. While numerous microbes have been identified inhabiting Australian Ixodidae, some of which are related to globally important tick-borne pathogens, little is known about the bacterial communities within ticks collected from Australian wildlife. In this study, 1,019 ticks were identified on 221 hosts spanning 27 wildlife species.

Counting Ticks (Acari: Ixodida) on Hosts Is Complex: A Review and Comparison of Methods.

Locating and counting parasites on a host is a fundamental aspect of ecological research and basic veterinary and clinical practice. Variability in the biology and behavior of both hosts and parasites creates many methodological, logistical, and ethical considerations that must be made to collect this deceptively simple measurement. We identified methods that are used to count ticks (Acari: Ixodida, Leach 1815) on hosts by reviewing the methods sections of relevant published studies.

Peri-urban black rats host a rich assembly of ticks and healthier rats have more ticks.

The black rat Rattus rattus has a distribution that includes much of Earth's terrestrial surface, and has adapted to exploit both habitats extensively modified by humans and rural habitats. Despite the fact that R. rattus are nearly ubiquitous, few studies have investigated urban or peri-urban R.

Overcoming prey naiveté: Free-living marsupials develop recognition and effective behavioral responses to alien predators in Australia.

Naiveté in prey arises from novel ecological mismatches in cue recognition systems and antipredator responses following the arrival of alien predators. The multilevel naiveté framework suggests that animals can progress through levels of naiveté toward predator awareness. Alternatively, native prey may be preadapted to recognize novel predators via common constituents in predator odors or familiar predator archetypes.

Landscapes within landscapes: A parasite utilizes different ecological niches on the host landscapes of two host species.

Parasites are distributed across populations of hosts, but also across microhabitats on or inside hosts: together the host population distribution and "host landscape" distribution comprise a part of the ecological niche of a parasite. In this paper we examine how a generalist parasite, the tick Ixodes holocyclus, is distributed at both the host population and host landscape scales in two species of host (Perameles nasuta and Rattus rattus) that co-occur. We anaesthetized wildlife to locate ticks from five generalized host body regions; we then analysed the distribution of ticks among the populations of hosts (aggregation) and the distribution of ticks among the available host body regions as niches.

Modeling habituation of introduced predators to unrewarding bird odors for conservation of ground-nesting shorebirds.

Foraging mammalian predators face a myriad of odors from potential prey. To be efficient, they must focus on rewarding odors while ignoring consistently unrewarding ones. This may be exploited as a nonlethal conservation tool if predators can be deceived into ignoring odors of vulnerable secondary prey.

Australian native mammals recognize and respond to alien predators: a meta-analysis.

Prey naiveté is a failure to recognize novel predators and thought to cause exaggerated impacts of alien predators on native wildlife. Yet there is equivocal evidence in the literature for native prey naiveté towards aliens. To address this, we conducted a meta-analysis of Australian mammal responses to native and alien predators.