Private lives of phascogales

In WA, the Brush-tailed Phascogale is known to occur in the south west between Perth and Albany. Image credit: Rewild Perth

What’s in a name? Especially when it comes in two parts, contains 19 letters, and is near unpronounceable. Juliet’s rose would have trouble smelling as sweet, if it were called a Phascogale tapoatafa!

The tapoatafa (brush tail) and their relatives the Red-tailed phascogales would be unfazed by these scientific monikers. They are carnivorous marsupials that live and hunt in in the dry, sclerophyll bush of the southwest. They eat insects and spiders and even small birds. You might see them in the Collie River valley, or near Margaret River, and think it’s a rat! Or a small possum! But then the big ears identify that it’s a phascogale climbing a tree and foraging.

They are not big these phascogales. Males are pushing 16 centimetres in length while females are a tad smaller. But here’s the rub for the boys. They have much shorter lives than their sex partners.

Fact is they suffer from “post-mating mortality” which is scientific for saying they die after sex. They don’t even make it to their first birthday! Females, on the other hand, live for three years, producing more little phascogales, helped by other, doomed-to-die males.

Despite their reproductive efforts phascogales are a threatened species with feral cats the main culprit. But there’s also predation by foxes and the loss of habitat.

It’s a common story of animal life in the bush.

And here’s another common story for these marsupials. Phascogales might well argue that they are better off with ancient Greek mouthfuls as names than a common alternative, mousesack.

I rest their case.

by David de Vos, WA Parks Ambassador