Educação pode mudar sua vida

    More than 20 species of Australianmammals have been exterminated by feralcats. These predators, which arrived with the European settlers [colonizadores], still threaten native wildlife – and are too abundant on the mainland to eliminate, as has been achieved on some small Australian islands that were previously infested withthem. But Alexandra Ross of the University ofNew South Wales thinks she has come up witha different way to deal with the problem. As she writes in a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology, she is giving feline-attentivenesslessons to wild animals involved in re-introduction programs, in order to try to makethem more aware of the dangers of feral cats.
     Many Australian mammals, though not actually extinct, are confined to fragments ofcat-free habitat. That offers the possibility oftaking colonists from these refuges to places where a species once existed but now is nolonger found. This will, however, put theenforced migrants back in the sights of the cats that caused the problem in the first place.Training the migrants while they are incaptivity, using models of cats and the sortsof sounds cats make, has proved expensiveand ineffective. Ms. Ross therefore wonderedwhether putting them in large naturalisticenclosures might serve as a form oftrainingcamp to prepare them for introductioninto their new, cat-infested homes.She tested this idea on bilbies, a smallAustralian mammal that superficiallyresembles a rabbit.
      She and her colleaguesraised a couple of hundred bilbies in a hugeenclosure that also contained five feral cats.As a control, she raised a nearly identical population in a similar enclosure without thecats. She left the animals to get on with theirlives for two years, which, given that bilbiesbreed four times a year and live for aroundeight years, was a substantial period for them. After some predation and presumably somelearning she selected 21 bilbies from eachenclosure, fitted radio transmitters to themand released them into a third enclosure thathad ten hungry cats in it. She then monitored what happened next.
    The upshot [resultado, conclusão] wasthat the training worked. Over the subsequent40 days, ten of the untrained animals wereeaten by cats, but only four of the trainedones. One particular behavioral differenceshe noticed was that bilbies brought up in apredator-free environment were much morelikely to sleep alone than were those broughtup around cats. And when cats are around,sleeping alone is dangerous.
     How the bilbies that have undergone this extreme training will survive in the wild remains to be seen. But Ms. Ross has at leastprovided reason for hope.