Paper Summary
Restoring the Macquarie Island Parakeet
Paper Title
Restoring islands and identifying source populations for introductions
Year
2018
Author Team
Hannah S. Wauchope, Richard A. Fuller, Danielle F. Shanahan, Justine D. Shaw.
The Southern Ocean encircles the Antarctic continent, and contains a number of small Sub-Antarctic Islands. These islands are hotspots of biodiversity, where many species of birds and seals flock to breed. Surpringsly, some of these islands are also home to tropical looking parakeets!
These little birds, which constitute various species and subspecies of the Red-crowned parakeet (Cyanoramphus novaezelandiae) clade, live on a handful of islands in the New Zealand Sub-Antarctic, but one species of them used to exist on an Australian Sub-Antarctic island, Macquarie Island.
Unfortunately the first human visitors to the island brought with them many invasive species including rabbits, rats, cats and mice. These wreaked havoc on the native Macquarie Island ecosystem. Strangely, it wasn’t the introduction of cats alone that led to the extinction of the parakeets, but it is thought that in a classic example of ecological trophic cascades, the introduction of rabbits to the island (a few years after the cats arrived) meant the cat population was able to expand, and eventually hunt the parakeets to extinction.
But recently, an enormous effort has been underway to rid Macquarie Island of its various invasive species, and this was declared a success in 2014. Since then, there has been discussion about re-introducing parakeets to the island to help in the restoration efforts.
Though exciting, before any such project could go ahead, we would need to decide where to take the parakeets from. So we conducted a study to assess which of the other parakeet species/subspecies would be best suited to life on Macquarie Island.
We found that far and away the most appropriate substitute would be a species living on Auckland Island, Reischek’s Parakeet:
Getting parakeets to the island is probably a ways off yet, but at least we know the first step!
