How Did Cats Get to Australia?
“A new study aims to settle the debate about how & when this invasive species was introduced to the island country.
...in some places cats are officially considered an invasive species. Like Australia...
Of the 22 invasive mammalian species found in Australia, 2 of them are predators – the European red fox & the domestic cat...
Feral cats – wild cats that live independently of humans, but are descended from domestic ones – have established invasive populations over large swaths of Australia, but there has long been debate about just where in fact they came from, Australia being an island & all. There have been several theories. One is that they hitched a ride on 19th century sailing vessels, where they served as resident mousers or companion animals. Another theory suggests that cats came there with European explorers in the late 18th century. And yet another postulates that cats accompanied Malaysian fisherman in the 17th century.
Knowing when cat populations were founded would increase the understanding of how the species has affected Australia, & thus researchers from the Senckenberg Biodiversity & Climate Research Centre & the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany set out to get some answers. They analyzed genetic samples from 269 Australian feral cats from 6 mainland & 7 island locations to explore their evolutionary history & dispersal patterns.
What they determined is that Australia’s feral cats likely came along with Europeans in the 19th century. While there was some evidence of a secondary influx from Southeast Asia, there was no indication of a stable feral cat population coming entirely from Asia.
‘The analysis of genetic structure & diversity of Australian feral cat populations answered the question of the time of feral cat introduction to Australia & revealed that remnants of the historically introduced cat genotypes are still discernible on isolated islands,’ says Katrin Koch... ‘These findings have implications for invasive species management, since our study determined a specific time frame for the arrival of cats to Australia, allowing us to link the time of introduction with the decline & extinction of several native species.’”
Melissa Breyer
December 16, 2015
care2.com
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