Jekyll and Hyde

Trip 6: Perth to Koolan Island

Purpose: Northern Quoll Annual Monitoring Phase II

Total Distance Traveled: 3768 km
Distance Traveled Year to Date: 15,391 km 

Little baby boy Northern Quolls are born in about August all cute and clingy. They spend quite sometime time in the safety of a den before they bound out of the den full of life and ready to take on the world. 

Over the wet season, which is the season when biomass productivity goes through the roof in the Kimberley, young boy quoll indulge in the absolute pursuit of food; large invertebrates and small vertebrates, mixed with plenty of fresh native fruit and vegetation.  Everything is on the menu is and the objective is to eat as much as possible in an effort achieve exponential growth. At this stage they are still incredibly adorable. They fit neatly in the palm of your hand and their fur is so full and fluffy and lustrous.  Though they are still relatively small and ridiculously cute, they are quite a handful and can give you a nip that will immediately bring tears to your eyes. 

In only a matter of a few more weeks they are nothing short of robust. Chunky and full of fatty body resources that they have invested immensely in acquiring. They are large, strong and have a certain presence; not to mention generous set of 'jatz crackers' that would equate to, in human terms, having a boxing speed-ball hanging between your stems. At this point they are still adorable, but in a 'blokes down the pub on a Friday night' kinda way. When they bite, it hurts.

And then.......well, the desire to mate overwhelms them and everything changes. Male quoll embark on a suicidal mating spree and in doing so tear through all their body fat and just about every other metabolic resource available to them. And when all of that runs out a surging flood of corticosteroids is liberated that keeps them pounding away long after their sexual batteries should have gone well and truly flat. 

This excess activity feeding off a hormone overload, rather than the standard metabolic processing of food or fat, results in a total shut down of an eventually exhausted immune system, which climaxes with gastrointestinal bleeding causing a brief but painful demise. 

Days out from lights out the once gorgeous little baby boy quoll starts to literally fall apart. The feet and ears hemorrhage, scab up and start to peel ways, patches of hair fall off, the tail is denuded and looks like a rotting carrot, they sweat profusely and smell profoundly. To top it all off this once delightful little creature becomes a rabid beast when in 'Shag to Death' mode: Click to observe.