Our medicine, cosmetics and other everyday products contain compounds taken from nature. But Traditional Owners may not have given permission for the materials or their knowledge to be used.
Worker bees with capped brood (brown), open brood (white larva), all sorts of coloured pollen and shiny fresh nectar.
Cooper Schouten
A single colony of bees can have 60,000 bees in it. Together, they can visit up to 50 million flowers each day to collect pollen and nectar. They’re not called ‘busy bees’ for nothing!
Paul Weston, Charles Sturt University and Theo Evans, The University of Western Australia
Wet and bulky cattle dung is very unlike marsupial dung that Australian dung beetles are adapted to deal with, meaning native dung beetles tend to leave it alone. But help from abroad is at hand.
The teddybear bee is a native Australian species.
James Dorey
Thousands of people in Australia and around the world have rallied to knit and crochet comfort items for wildlife. Their efforts are the latest in a long history of crafting for a cause.
An example of a typical dingo. Photograph depicts a male from K’gari-Fraser Island (Queensland).
John Williams
Of all Australia’s wildlife, one stands out as having an identity crisis: the dingo. New research has found the dingo is its own species, distinct from ‘wild dogs’.
Colonial graziers found it more effective to poison dingoes than rely on convict shepherds to protect their flocks.
Justine Philip/AMMRIC 2017
As soon as white colonists began farming sheep in Australia, they looked for a way to eradicate dingoes.
The Flock Bronzewing is an inland species that is vulnerable to drought. Those vulnerabilities are heightened in an era of climate change and increased risks from feral predators.
Shutterstock
Bushfires are a part of life in Australia, and when they have run their course we pick up where we left off and carry on. But if you happen to be a small animal, surviving the bushfire is only the start…
Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University