Conservation parks don’t have to be vast – as one tiny grasshopper reminds us

by bpckle | Oct 12, 2026 | In the Media

A vast stretch of land where animals roam widely and plants grow freely. That’s what most people would picture if they thought of a conservation area.

Such places are vital for protecting large animals and entire ecosystems. They make managing environmental threats, such as fire and weed invasions, much easier.

However, some parts of Australia simply don’t have the space to support a large conservation area. This is particularly true in agricultural regions. In the cropping country of northwestern Victoria, for example, remnant reserves may only cover less than 100 hectares.

These smaller reserves are often undervalued and overlooked. However, our latest research reveals these remnant areas can be critical to the survival of smaller plants and animals.

Meet the matchstick grasshopper

Our recent study took a closer look at grasshoppers in western Victoria. We rediscovered a formerly undescribed species of the Keyacris genus of grasshoppers, which includes the threatened Key’s matchstick.

We named the new species as the Murray Mallee matchstick (Keyacris bungunnia) because it lives around the region where an old megalake, Lake Bungunnia, existed during the Pleistocene era. The Murray Mallee matchstick likely hopped about on its shores.

Matchstick grasshoppers, named for their distinctive stick-like appearance, are unique to Australia. The roughly 250 related species are found in many habitats across the country, including desert and mulga scrubland, eucalyptus woodland and grassy plains. Far from being pests, these native grasshoppers are a natural part of Australian landscapes, feeding on native plants and supporting local food webs.

Our latest study, led by student Kim Kaufmann, mapped the distribution of this grasshopper species across several sites. Our findings suggest each population was genetically distinct from the others.

Given matchstick grasshoppers don’t have wings even when fully grown, they don’t typically travel far from where they are born. But in places with continuous habitat, they can spread slowly over generations.

Research shows one species reached northern Tasmania from Victoria while another travelled 2,200 kilometres across the Nullarbor Plain on the way from Kalgoorlie to Broken Hill.

As landscapes become increasingly fragmented, environmental threats such as fire or overgrazing during drought could wipe out whole populations. This is particularly dangerous for animals like the Murray Mallee matchstick that don’t have wings or any other way of shifting to other places.

High quality habitat

There’s a flip side to our findings.

Finding a matchstick grasshopper in a small, remnant reserve could indicate you have stumbled across high quality habitat, home to other vulnerable species.

For example, one of our Murray Mallee matchstick sites was later discovered to support the largest known population of the threatened Eltham copper butterfly (Paralucia pyrodiscus lucida). Many of these insects are poorly studied, even when they play a crucial role in our local ecosystems.

However, these valuable remnant reserves are typically overlooked in conservation efforts and are often poorly managed, overrun by weeds or even covered with rubbish.

Fortunately, conserving these areas for vulnerable animals doesn’t have to be expensive or complex. Grasshoppers can survive as long as food plants are available, even in small patches of suitable habitat. For instance, translocated populations of the Larapuna grasshopper (Vandiemenella viatica) have surged at several revegetated sites near Melbourne.

Most recently, scientists have successfully introduced the threatened Key’s matchstick grasshopper into the Euroa arboretum in northeast Victoria.

The benefits of these projects go beyond grasshoppers. Matchstick grasshoppers are a crucial food source for other insects, spiders and small birds, especially in late winter and early spring when most insects are yet to hatch.

Many insect species, including the Murray Mallee matchstick, have likely persisted in remnant reserves. Conserving and managing these small, and often overlooked, areas is one way to help rare critters thrive.

Ary Hoffmann receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Michael Kearney receives funding from The Australian Research Council.

Invasive species do much more damage in Australia and NZ than elsewhere. But why?

by bpckle | Oct 12, 2026 | In the Media

If you had to pick the countries where invasive species pose the biggest problems, you probably wouldn’t think of Australia.

The continent has some of the world’s strictest biosecurity, a small human population and a comparatively short period of colonial occupation. It is also girt by sea. All of this should make introduced species less of an issue.

But Australia is one of the top three nations affected by feral species, after the United States and New Zealand.

More than 4,000 species have been introduced at last count. Of these, 3,000 are sufficiently out of control to be considered invasive. The damage they do to crops, infrastructure and nature now costs around 1.25% of GDP – almost as much as Australia spends on aged care.

So why are determined efforts and natural advantages often unable to stem Australia’s feral tide?

Important answers come from island biogeography, a field of study pioneered by Alfred Russell Wallace. He is the scientist who discovered evolution through natural selection, independently from Charles Darwin but at the same time.

Islands are rather isolated environments, which means unique species are more likely to evolve. But isolation also means their inhabitants are particularly vulnerable to invasive species.

Known as the island continent, Australia demonstrates this on a huge scale. Australia has a high number of species found nowhere else, and is one of only 17 megadiverse nations. But the isolation that protected these species over millions of years has left many vulnerable to new threats brought by humans.

Every Australian knows common myna birds are bad, rabbits are worse and feral cats kill native animals unchecked.

But how do we decide what makes an introduced species “good” or “bad” – and will we ever concede that some species are here to stay?

Our new series on invasive species explores these questions.

Lopsided ecosystems, unfilled niches and unwary species

Australia’s biodiversity is largely an accident of its insular history.

Australia was near the South Pole when it broke away from the supercontinent of Gondwana, and the cold climate limited the diversity of animals present. The animals and plants that did make it here afterward found a sparsely inhabited continent.

These colonising lineages often diversified into a wide variety of species. The continent is thus short on lineages, but rich in species.

Most famously, Australia is a marsupial paradise, with a dizzying array of pouched mammals. The continent had almost no ground-dwelling placental mammals until rodents arrived from Asia about eight million years ago.

Australia also has the highest diversity of unique plants of any country on earth.

Across most of the world, largely harmless colubroid snakes account for most snake species. But to the consternation of ophidiophobes (those scared of snakes), most Australian snakes are venomous elapids who descended from relatives of deadly front-fanged cobras.

This lopsided biodiversity makes Australia unusually vulnerable to invasion for three reasons.

First, invasive species can fill ecological niches not well used by native species.

Second, they can be unfamiliar predators or competitors against which Australian species have little defence.

Third, super-invader species are more likely to evolve on larger continents and invade Australia rather than the reverse.

Cats and rabbits, super invaders

A super invader is a fast-breeding species able to eat a broad range of foods, tolerate many different environments and spread quickly. These traits help them quickly colonise new places and outcompete native species.

Species evolving on large, well-connected landmasses are more likely to be good at invading new areas, as their evolutionary adaptations have been honed by encounters with a broader range of adversaries.

Many of Australia’s worst invasive species are super invaders, from cane toads to fire ants. But feral cats and rabbits stand out from the pack. These are Australia’s two costliest invaders.

Cats and rabbits both evolved on Eurasia, the largest landmass. Domestic cats emerged in the Middle East, from a local wildcat. European rabbits are native to Europe’s southwest, where they are actually endangered.

Eurasia’s range of species is much broader than Australia’s. Many wildcats and related species would have co-evolved with marsupials, who lived in Eurasia until around 14 million years ago.

But bilbies evolved in isolation and would never have met any placental predators, let alone cats.

Feral cats are a global issue. But Australia is the epicentre for extinctions driven by cats.

Rabbits have become a problem in many countries, but their voracious appetites and ability to outcompete native species such as bilbies means they have done the most damage in Australia.

Both cats and rabbits have exploited ecological niches not well used by native Australian animals.

No marsupial predators have diets as broad as feral cats, nor do they roam everywhere from the baking deserts of Central Australia to the freezing forests of Tasmania.

Australia has no mid-sized marsupials able to breed like, well, rabbits and devour all greenery in sight. Bettongs prefer roots and fungi, while bilbies are omnivores. Both reproduce much more slowly.

Every other continent has native cat (felids) and rabbit relatives (lagomorphs). But Australia did not, and so our species were uniquely unprepared.

Before human colonisation, the main mammals preying on bilbies were quolls, which are smaller and slower than feral cats.

Many native plants – especially in drier regions – also produce seedlings vulnerable to the ravenous grazing of rabbits.

Worse, rabbits often avoid invasive weeds such as lantana (native to the Americas), as these co-evolved with rabbits or their relatives and acquired defences such as an unpleasant taste.

The blessing and curse of islands

What about New Zealand, which is even more isolated than Australia and has an even more lopsided biota? It’s here that introduced animals from Australia have done the most damage.

While Australia only has a few native land-dwelling placental mammals, New Zealand had none at all.

When wallabies and possums were introduced from Australia, it was easy for them to run rampant and become pests.

But the same species aren’t such a problem elsewhere, as they face much stiffer competition when trying to get a foothold on landmasses packed with placental mammals.

Life on an island can be splendid isolation – until new challengers arrive. This is why Australia (and New Zealand) need such tough biosecurity controls – and why they still suffer the most damage from invasive species.

Mike Lee receives research funding from the Australian Research Council.