Wild things: No yowie, but team hunts new species in NQ rainforest
Mystery creatures are set to be discovered in far north Queensland’s rainforests – but yowie hunters shouldn’t get too excited.
James Cook Universityās Professor Bill Laurance is confident new technology used by his research team will unearth ānever-before-seen speciesā in the regionās rainforest canopies.
āThereās heaps of stuff in a rainforest that hasnāt been discovered yet,ā he told AAP.
āAny time you start looking in strange places like a canopy all kind of things pop up.
āItās one of the great biological frontiers left on the planet.ā
Prof Laurance is director of JCUās Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science (TESS), a group of about 160 scientists working across far north Queensland aiming to āreveal the secrets of the rainforestā.
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But he warned yowie enthusiasts shouldnāt get their hopes up.
āThere is a vanishing, small chance in my view that they exist,ā he said.
āFor something that big and that conspicuous to go undiscovered is going to the fringes of reality.
āIt would be a great story. Are you kidding? The scientist who discovers it would be made for life but there is a very tiny chance.ā
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Prof Laurance does keep an open mind on what other secrets the region may hold after leading a 2017 expedition to Cape York in search of the Tasmanian Tiger or Thylacine.
āSome of the people we spoke to swore that they had seen one but we found no Thylacines,ā said Prof Laurance, who analysed more than 100,000 photos taken in the region.
āThere is a very small probability (Tasmanian Tigers still exist).
āBut scientists have discovered too many times when we think something is completely gone, it reappears ā you never know.ā
Prof Laurance is excited by what TESS is set to discover thanks to new technology, saying āhalf to two-thirds of all insect speciesā in rainforest canopies are yet to be found.
TESS researcher Dr Sandra Abell has already been credited with finding a population of the endangered northern bettong or rat kangaroo ā thought to be extinct ā on the Atherton Tableland near Cairns.
āThere are new technologies and genetic techniques that are being used to discover lots of species,ā Prof Laurance said.
āLots of weird and wonderful things have been discovered by things like environmental DNA used to sample water and amplify DNA samples.
āJust a rare animal pooing in the water is all it takes to identify it.ā
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