Video transcript
Hi my name is Sophie and welcome to video number three. In this video you will be introduced to two native organisms and their habitats.
The first organism is the Red-crowned toadlet. The Red-crowned toadlet is small frog with distinctive markings that is rarely seen due to its size and peculiar behaviour. Scientists often call these hard-to-find animals cryptic.
It is a dark brown to black frog with distinctive reddish orange patches on its back and a marbled black and white belly growing only two to three centimetres long. It forages in the leaf litter for tiny invertebrates such as small ants, termites and springtails.
The Red-crowned toadlet is a threatened species. Here is a map showing its distribution. The red section shows the area where the toadlet is known to occur. The purple extension that you can see is where scientists predict the toadlet might be found.
However the toadlet does not occur throughout these entire areas as their habitats are restricted to open forests on Hawkesbury and Narrabeen sandstone. They are usually found in small colonies scattered along periodically wet drainage lines below sandstone ridges that have shale cappings or layers. Toadlets shelter under rocks and amongst masses of dense vegetation or thick piles of leaf litter.
They have a range of amazing adaptations that allow them to repel or even kill predators and survive long dry periods. You will be learning more about this both on your excursion day and using secondary sources.
Due to the tendency for toadlet populations to concentrate at particular sites a relatively small localised disturbance due to human activities will often have a major impact on a local population if it occurs on a favoured breeding or refuge site. This is the main reason that the Red-crowned toadlet has been declared a threatened species.
Now let's look at the Long-nosed bandicoot. The Long-nosed Bandicoot is a small to medium-sized omnivorous marsupial that is quite territorial. Each bandicoot likes to set itself up in a territory that contains a patchy mixture of vegetation and features. Scientists call these mosaic habitats.
The habitat features they need are patches of dense ground cover vegetation where they can shelter from the sun and predators during the day. And then some more open areas with scattered vegetation, loamy soils and leaf litter where they can sniff around for and dig up their preferred foods which are invertebrates, fungus and plant tubers.
They perform a very beneficial role as a bioturbator in that their continual scratching and digging turns over the top and middle layers of the soil. This helps the fungus and plants by spreading spores and seeds as well as aerating the soil and helping improve water infiltration.
Did you know that the Long-nosed bandicoot has the shortest gestation period of any marsupial. Its young spend just 12 days inside its uterus. It is then born looking like a little pink jelly bean and will spend the next few months developing inside mum's pouch.
Long-nosed bandicoot's are not a threatened species in Australia, however they are almost extinct from their habitats in and around Sydney Harbour. There are very few remnant populations around the harbour and the inner west and these have been declared threatened populations.
See you on the day.
End of transcript.