It was a rough five months as I became fully nocturnal in the pursuit of the question: what affects the road mortality rate of ringtail possums in an urban environment? To answer this, I would head out just before dawn every 3 days to start the 1.5 hour trip around every single street in a 2.25 km2 area of St Lucia and Taringa in the hope of finding a road-killed possum that I could take back to the lab. Between when I started in mid-October 2019 and when I finished at the start of March 2020 I collected 20 dead possums.
My study area; man it’s big.
I didn’t just collect dead possums though - I also counted cars to estimate the vehicle density, counted live possums to estimate population density and convinced my friends and family to let me record their speed as they drove through sections the study area. Of course, all this data collection was completed at night because in order to spot the possums you must become one. I mean… Look at these cuties that I spotted along my transects, I love babies!
The first night of possum spotlighting in October (left) and the last night of spotlighting with Nellie Pease in March (right).
Between October 2019 and March 2020, with the help of my amazing team of volunteers, I counted approximately 4900 cars on 48 roads and more than 750 live possums on 12 transects. Of course this didn’t happen all at once, I spent 16 nights counting cars and 18 nights running around the neighbourhood equipped with click-counters and super bright head-torches to spotlight possums. These nights were the best bit by far, because I got to hang out with my friends and walk around looking for these cute little guys all in the name of science!
After finally finishing my field work I began the long process of reverting my sleep schedule back to hours normally kept by humans (and not possums). I was so excited to return to the office and properly start writing my thesis but after only being back for a very short week we were all told to work from home as UQ closed down for COVID-19. What a bummer.
Writing was a challenge because I was locked in my house with my family who were all trying to work from home too. Also my dog Jessie was a huge distraction because she was almost always doing something cute and if no one paid attention to her, she’d get grouchy. But despite the distractions and inconveniences of meetings over Zoom or Facetime, I finished my thesis right on time and successfully presented it! Now it's on to re-writing it for publication and preparing to attend the ESA conference in November.
< Jessie after she dramatically shredded a toy all over the living room rug.