Where do Australia's marsupial moles come from?

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2025-01-07 10:30

Australia; VIC; SA; WA; NT

Image credit: M. Gillam, AUSCAPE

Australian researchers have investigated the genes of a marsupial mole to find out more about one of the country's most enigmatic species. Marsupial moles are small (14-18cm long) and hard to find, with two types living in the northwestern and central Australian desert. The researchers sequenced the genome of a female specimen from the SA Museum, and found the marsupials are most closely related to bandicoots and bilbies. They say they found evidence that the marsupial mole population was once far greater than it is now, with population decline likely driven by changes in climate rather than human intervention, though the animals now often fall prey to introduced species such as foxes.

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Research AAAS, Web page

Journal/
conference: Science Advances

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: The University of Melbourne, South Australian Museum, Monash University

Funder: Funding support to A.J.P. and S.R.F. was provided by BioPlatforms Australia and Oz Mammals Genomics, with special thanks to J. Deakin and A. Gilbert. Funding for S.L. and N.C. was provided by the National Eye Institute as part of the NIH (EY030546). The computational resources used were partially funded by the NIH Shared Instrumentation Grant 1S10OD021644-01A1 to N.C.

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