Performance of Felixer devices when faced with captive-held Spotted-tailed Quolls: Do they pose a risk to an endangered marsupial carnivore?

Abstract

Feral Cats are widespread and common across Australia, preying upon a wide diversity and large quantity of vertebrates and invertebrates. Curbing their impacts demands developing new control methods, as existing techniques are only usually partially successful. One such new method is the Felixer, a device that uses a combination of sensors to differentiate Feral Cats from other fauna before delivering a toxic gel to the fur of its target. Subsequently, this gel is then groomed and ingested. Before the Felixer can be more widely adopted, however, it is important to understand its target specificity. In a series of pen trials, we examined the ability of Felixer devices to discriminate Spotted-tailed Quolls, a cat-sized marsupial carnivore high on the list of species of concern. Over several weeks, multiple Spotted-tailed Quolls were each individually placed in pens with Felixers programmed in photograph only mode to take photographs only when sensors were triggered. Overall, there were almost 4000 detection events where Quolls passed in front of these devices and photographs taken. Nearly 1300 of these detections showed Quolls in a perpendicular or side-on position, ideally placed for the Felixer sensor arrays. Despite this exposure, there were no instances where the Felixer devices indicated that they would have activated on Quolls, had they been in lethal mode. This finding adds to recently published work in Tasmania, that also showed Quolls were highly unlikely to be incorrectly identified. Nevertheless, further studies of non-target discrimination by the Felixer device on other species of native wildlife is vital before they are made fully operational. This is particularly the case on the eastern seaboard of the country where the device has not yet been widely used and much remains to be learned about how they perform when faced with different species.