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In areas used intensively for agriculture, environmental change has been pronounced, with large amounts of native vegetation being removed through agricultural land clearing, with isolated patches of bush remaining in a ‘sea’ of farmland. I’m interested in the effects of patch isolation in an agricultural setting, and potential impacts on the breeding behaviour of the Agile Antechinus, which is a small marsupial carnivore, related to Dunnarts, Quolls, and Tasmanian devils. This species has an interesting breeding system, with features including an almost total male die off at the end of the breeding season in August, multiple paternity, and male-biased dispersal as an inbreeding avoidance mechanism. It is unknown if farmland poses a barrier to male dispersal, and to explore this I am using microsatellites to investigate patch isolation, sex biased dispersal, kin avoidance, and multiple paternity within fragments of varying size around Naringal, east of Warrnambool. |
