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Northern Quoll — printable fact sheet
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Northern Quoll
Dasyurus hallucatus
Dasyurus hallucatus is the smallest of the four Australian quolls and by far the most reckless. Males are effectively semelparous: they breed in a frantic winter rut, stop eating and sleeping, run themselves into immune collapse under sustained cortisol, and almost all die befor…
Did you know?
- The introduction of poisonous cane toads to Australia has caused dramatic declines in Northern Quoll populations, as the quolls die after eating the toxic toads.
- Toad-smart behaviour learned by trained quolls has been shown to pass to their offspring, so a single intervention can seed a self-perpetuating aversion in a wild population. The species name hallucatus refers to the hallux, the first toe — the northern quoll has a well-developed one that many other quolls lack, part of its climbing kit. Because males all die after the rut, a population can be reduced to nothing but pregnant females in a matter of weeks, an extreme boom-bust structure among mammals.
What I learned
Draw the northern quoll
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