Naturally speaking. Hi everyone, I'm Madbina that and in this episode they're going to find out how Master Student Bigger Bigger got on with his fieldwork on Waddle Island in the Fortlands, so this is a project that's done with previous Master Student TJ Clark and their supervisor, Ewan Weekard. So Bigger, could you tell us a bit about the work you've been doing in the field? Sure, with my supervisors, I have done a survey of South American grey boxes in the Fortland Islands.
We surveyed Waddle Island, which is the third largest island in the Fortlands, to see if there were any boxes there and any other species actually we came across as well. We laid out a random transect to do a distant starting survey of foxes on the island. Additionally to this, when we did the survey we would collect any scats we found of the foxes to get an ever-fideer off the diet. Waddle Island is a fairly large island but it's very remote, there's no people living there permanently.
Because the island is so remote, it's quite difficult to communicate and there's no phone connection or internet, so all we had to rely on was a satellite phone. When we did the survey we'll be camping around the island and we'll be hiking 40 to 30 kilometres a day doing the survey and the transects. So I guess the question is why? What are you trying to address while you're looking at this?
We're looking at this introduced South American grey fox and it was introduced in the 1930s. The foxes was just left on some of the islands to rem free and hasn't really been managed since then. We don't have an idea of what they're eating and how many there are, but they are predicted to predate on a lot of the endemic bird species on the islands, but they used to be a candidate living in the Fortlands 200 years ago, the native Fortland island which was extinct. So therefore the endemic bird species might actually be adapted to having a candidate predating on them and therefore the foxes might actually not be as big a threat to the bird populations as we might expect and therefore the foxes might even act as an ecological replacement of the native Fortland island.
Currently there's been no published studies of the foxes. Despite of this the foxes have been classified as invasive on the islands and there's been multiple eradication attempts of the foxes. Is there maybe a hypothesis for what you think they might be eating? We weren't there long enough to sort of observe what they've been eating to see the foxes actually prey on anything.
What we are doing is we collected scats around the island and these scats have been dried and sent off to Glasgow and I'm looking through the contents to sort of get an idea of their dietary composition. And do you know whether they're in other parts of the island? Is that something you're looking at? With the distance I'm serving that we did, we will get an idea of how many foxes there are and whenever we would see a fox we would take it to a GPS coordinate off where we saw it and this gives us an indication of the abundance of animals on the island but it also gives an idea of where the foxes actually are seeing but the data has not yet been finally analysed.
This sounds like a really large project. I was wondering is it just the three of you that have been doing this or is it part of why do project? I was just wondering the collaboration involved to make such a huge project. Yeah, so it's mainly the three of us to be honest.
We've been fortunate that we've got a branch from the Falkland Island Government and so we have been working quite closely together with the South American Environmental Research Institute which are based in the Falklands and we had one person working there called Elairie who helped us doing some of the surveys as well and they have been quite helpful as well with getting everything sent back to Glasgow and to get permits and what not we needed in the Falklands. Could you have any difficulties with the project? I mean in terms of just getting there or? Well just the whole getting there.
It took two days to get there. Could you talk this through that? How did you? Well so because there are not many sort of connections between Argentina and the Falklands Islands you have to go through Chile so we would have to fly to Santiago and Chile and that's a 14 hour flight just as Santiago and Chile and from there we would then go to the Falklands which is a seven hour flight and then from Stanley which is the main city in the Falklands there's this very small plane that they've travelled around in the islands with that we would take to the Chewet of Island.
Do you have any other fun anecdotes that you can try? So one thing that is actually really interesting is how on a fray the foxes are humans because they don't really meet many humans they come really close and most nights they would actually come around and scavenge around through our camp. They are quite curious. They are quite curious which is also why they're actually now promoting in the islands the foxes are ecotourism where people come to see the foxes rather than penguins or sea lines that's sort of the common thing to see there.
That's amazing so then your project could potentially have a really important aspect to play in that ecotourism. I suppose it could well I mean we're going to display what they're eating and how many there are. So is the great fox at risk or endangered at all? So they are clearly being hunted quite extensively in the Falklands despite of them actually being a sighted species which complicates its breeding specimens to the back of the UK but...
What's the sighted species? Sighted species are protected worldwide and therefore makes it difficult to transport any kind of remnants of them between countries. So what about other animals on the island? Did you see anything else?
I saw a lot of different animals that I have never seen before. There was multiples sea lines but also penguins. On where do they have two different types of penguins? There are gente and mantillanic penguins.
So other chrosses and a lot of other petrels as well. And multiple of the endemic bird species obviously are like the Falklands team of dark. So Vika, thank you so much for answering your questions. We really appreciate hearing about your research.
It's also great to hear about Master's projects going on at the University of Glasgow. It's so different and can really have some amazing real world and important applications. So thank you very much. Thank you.
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