Add Category
Updated
The first door that opens in the research station leads to a room filled with stainless steel tables.
Two women are unpacking and re-wrapping frozen birds — rails, owls, hens and blackbirds. You name it, it's frozen solid and on this table.
These birds, found dead through natural causes or on the side of a road, have been plonked into the deep freeze by Lord Howe Island locals, to await the attention of curators from the Australian Museum.
This year, the museum launched a celebratory trip to mark the 190th year since the establishment of the institution, sending teams to the island with the express purpose of adding to the museum collections.
What that actually means, on the ground, is collecting dead things. And sometimes killing live things so that their dead parts can be collected.
The maps in your bird guide, the average size of the wallaby listed on the internet, the known range of almost all the wildflowers in the world — all of this is informed by dead specimens in museums.
Your knowledge and love of the natural world, and mine too, cannot be separated from the death of individual animals.
Catching tiny bats with a harp
It can seem like Lord Howe Island is all about birds.
But they're joined in whizzing flight every night by the only native mammal on the island: the large forest bat.
Except it's not large. It's so tiny it could easily be dismissed as a meaty moth.
This precision flying insect-eater is the only mammal that ever managed to get a real foothold on the island before humans brought their goats, cows, dogs and rats.
How and when the bat arrived were once mysteries.
But researchers have used genetics to work out how long it's been since the island population split from the genetic lineage of the mainland, and that it's continually supplemented by blow-ins.
But getting genetic information to fuel such research means you have to catch the tiny bats.
To do this, mammologists from the museum walk through the island's forests carrying sets harp traps — tent poles and guys laced with delicate lines of fishing wire.
They set up across a path in the forest as the dusk is turning to night and it's the time for the bats to fly.
Whales buried at the foot of a mountain
Mount Gower stands at one end of Lord Howe Island with a toupee of mist at its crest.
At its base is a paddock home to a herd of cows. And three dead dense-beaked whales.
They were first seen while still alive, approaching boats in 2006. They are a rare sight for any human, even whale researchers, and are often very shy of water craft.
But calamity followed this burst of unusual behaviour.
Shortly after the trio were first spotted they beached themselves on Lord Howe Island's rocks. It's not understood why.
After the beachings, the carcasses were towed to the paddock at the foot of the mountain, hoisted, and rolled into a hole several metres deep.
The movement and pressure caused a whale foetus to come out of its mother. Born in the hole, it was frozen and sent to the mainland for immediate research.
But the other whales, each about 4 metres long with light skin and spots, were buried in the paddock.
And for the last six years, cows have grazed over their graves — until now.
At the foot of the mountain, mammologists who normally work in the Australian Museum's labs and storage facilities are being rained on in a ditch while digging up the skeletons of three Blainville's beaked whales.
"They're called beaked whales, because they sort of have a long beak like a dolphin. They're basically just a big cylinder with flippers and a tail," Dr Sandy Ingleby, who manages the vertebrate collection at the Australian Museum, says.
She is standing in the dirt, pants rolled, surrounded by the bones of whales.
"They'll go down … into the depths, so they're very streamlined whales," says Dr Mark Eldridge, senior research scientist from the museum.
"They occur right off the continental shelf and they feed on deep sea squid and deep sea fish.
"And they feed by suction. They have these plates in their throat that they're able to expand, so essentially… they sneak up on squid or fish in the depths then inflate these throat sacks really massively to suck the squid or the fish in.
"They don't chew them because they don't have any teeth, so they just swallow."
The whales communicate with a series of buzzes, whistles and clicks while they swim in the depths, but maintain silence when towards the surface.
It's believed they do this to avoid giving up their locations to killer whales, who will happily attack their cousins for a feed.
Tapping with a plastic trowel, the mammologists think they've found the jaw bone of one of the whales — a long and pointy brown object, interwoven with the roots of the meadow grasses.
"Tests on the bone have found that this is actually the most dense bone of any vertebrate animal in terms of the mineral content, which is fortunate for us, because it's probably lasted for longer than it would otherwise," Dr Ingleby says, carefully removing dark soil from the bone.
These whales are so rare that lab samples are incredibly hard to come by, Dr Eldridge explains.
"There is still so few samples world-wide that we're not in a position yet to do population genetics on them… and hopefully in 70 years, 100 years someone can do a population genetic study, but if we don't' do our bit now, that's not going to happen," he says, covered in dirt.
A game of chance
In the darkness of night before the dawn, the forest smells like damp earth, and the endemic palms of the island rub their fronds together in a windy chorus.
In the bat trap is a tiny warrior, enemy of flying insects — a micro-bat, sleeping soundly. She looks like a curled leaf.
The collection of vertebrates like this microbat is strictly controlled within Australia by a permit system, and the number of animals taken from the wild is stringently monitored.
But, from the individual animal's perspective, that control matters little.
"The bats can probably detect even the fishing line," Dr Ingelby says.
"If we put [the traps] in runways where they're used to flying and they haven't really got their ultrasound switched on, they'll just blunder into a trap and fall into a bag and be safely stored over night until we can come and remove them.
"In this case we have permission to collect and take back four specimens of large forest bats."
In real terms, this means that four bats will be killed for science.
Composting for a clean skeleton
A rusty oily smell pervades parts of the soil, where whale flesh still lingers.
The bones are dark in colour and are quite fragile despite their reputation for density. But the mammologists persist, because each of these skeletons is extremely valuable.
But there is an easier way than this to extract a clean skeleton from a huge marine mammal.
The method, first used by The Smithsonian Institute, involves covering the animal in layers of hay and compost, and then sealing it with a tarp — and Dr Ingleby has decided to trial the system on the NSW mainland.
"All the organisms do their work and eat away the flesh and you end up with these lovely clean white bones," she says.
"We had a bit of a backlog of specimens in the freezer — things like dugongs, a couple of dolphins and a couple of larger beaked whale heads.
"So we put them in the rosary garden, just in a circle and put a tarp down and pegged it down so no foxes or anything would come and steal it away. It worked wonderfully and those specimens are now in the collection and out of the freezer."
But the new technique came to light after these whales beached. So for now the scientists are stuck in a pit, pulling earth smelling of bad breath away from the bones.
As they work, one says: "I think I'd like to be cremated."
From wild animal to specimen
The bat weighs 5 grams.
Five grams of silky microbat, of piggy nose and stretchy wing.
In a world of science data, she's an unlucky individual — one who blundered into a harp trap at the start of a research trip.
But while her life will be cut short, her legacy will be extended.
"I have to say most zoologists get into this field because we really like animals, we like working with animals," Dr Ingleby says.
"No one wants to do it. But, most scientists associated with the museum can see the long-term benefits. It's something that we realise we need to do.
"A lot of what we understand about the biology of Australian and Pacific mammals in general is really based on specimens lodged in museums. They're the building blocks of scientific research in the country."
Specimen like this contributes to the maps of distribution used by governments' to make conservation decisions; it informs the maps in your Mammals of Australia pocket guide.
It will be referred to in the distant future, and used to understand today's world, by technologies not yet imagined.
And yet, this tiny bat, with its silken back; mouth full of tiny sharp teeth; bright but black eyes and tiny claws will no longer get to fly, hunt, mate or have young.
The weight of the scientific world falls on its furred shoulders.
Without a noise, the tiny bat makes the one-way journey from wild animal to specimen, via an injection that closes her eyes and makes her body go limp.
After some minutes, the specimen starts to curl and stiffen — one last act of defiance by the luckless.
A scalpel cuts her gizzard and tiny pincers are used to take a liver sample. The diaphragm is pierced, she is tagged, and dropped whole into a jar of ethanol.
One night, flying through a forest, the next delicately examined through jewellers' goggles; measured, labelled, and stored.
She's ready for eternity.
Ann Jones travelled to Lord Howe Island as a guest of the Australian Museum.
Topics: ecology, animals-and-nature, environment, conservation, research, lord-howe-island-2898
First posted