What a way to start the day: diarrhoea!

I love a good “adventure rally”. Why? Because nothing is coming the other way. 

When you are 45 and you have a spouse, multiple teenage kids to feed, a couple of credit cards, a mortgage and a stressful job then you have all the fuel to fire a major mid-life crisis. Thankfully, clubs like the Trail and Enduro Motorcycle Club of WA are there to save us from ourselves. 

Let’s face it, if it weren’t for the annual KTM Adventure Rally we would all be getting our backs, sacs and cracks waxed, drowning ourselves in fake tan, buying a ’68 ‘Stang, a pair of Wayfarers and cruising the sunset strip with Don Henley cranked to 12 on the wireless. 

The KTM Adventure Rally is our mid-life anti-crisis; our preventative medicine. 

At 45 responsibilities weigh heavy when we are out riding trails. I don’t know about you, but the faster I go the more I worry about who is going to manage my business on Monday morning if I am in traction. And that is exactly why I love the Adventure Rally: Because nothing is coming the other way and I can immerse myself wholly and completely in my ride. 

Adventure rallies are non-competitive so, providing you can temper your own ego, the only thing you need worry about are the A-grade enduro riders that will use solely for the purpose of gaining additional traction out of a corner. You don’t need to worry about having a head on collision with another bike, quad or buggy, as you would every time you ride in one of those fish bowls that local governments call a ‘designated riding area’. You don’t need to worry about being harassed by rangers for riding in a catchment or quarantine area and, best of all, there are little signs along the entire route that tell you where to go and when you are about to encounter a widow(er) making obstacle. All you need to do on the KTM Adventure Rally’s is breath; ride; repeat. 

 No better way to see a sunrise than through the haze of exhaust smoke! I think there were birds singing. Not sure, actually?

I have attended several. More often than not, my bike won’t start in Park Ferme and I am OK with that as there are more than 250 other riders that can give me a bump. I ride a bike that is brilliant once it starts, but it is an electric start with no kick start back-up; who can guess which bike I ride? And herein lies one of the greatest attributes of the rally: It does not matter what you ride because it is not a race. You can be on a 130kg KTM 500 Adventure tourer or a crusty old Maico or XR. Your bike can be as reliable as sunrise or as fallible as…..well, let’s not name names. And that is why I come back year after year. So you can only imagine how disappointed I was when my digestive system decided to explode 15 minutes out from the start of the event. I don’t even know what it was I ate the night before, but it wasn’t pretty. Nevertheless, I buckled up my duds and got on with it.

It simply does not matter what you ride: whether it weighs a tonne like this KTM500 set up for safari (136kg at the curb) or it it is old, gnarly and ready to rip your arms off like this insane 2-stroke Maico 490

Once you get going there are two loops (the first being 65 km and the second being 35 km) to keep you entertained. And if you are better than me, which most people are, you can ride the second loop multiple times. This year dust was an issue, but more often than not it is boggier than Shrek’s back paddock. Nevertheless, it was pretty easy to find a gap among the riders where the dust had cleared and you could more confidently put the hammer down. 

Unfortunately for me, after less than 5km my back brake faded to nothing and I was compelled to ride like ‘Miss Daisy’ for the remaining 60 km of the first loop. I think I may have been passed even by the local fauna.

Remembering that this was not a race, I resigned myself to relax and enjoy the tootle through the scrub. Will I be back next year? Of course, I will.

I Shall Love You To Death

Every year since 2013 I have spent several weeks, during April and May, on an island in the Kimberley. I have been monitoring a population of Northern Quoll and, to be honest, I thought I knew a fair bit about these grouse little marsupials.  But after my last trip I now know that all I know is that I know very little.

The truth is that field surveys are but a snap shot in time from which you can interpret very little. What you see over a couple of weeks (even if you visit year after year) may reveal something about a population, but it reveals little about the individuals that comprise that population. And when you are studying a highly evolved top order predator that lives faster and dies younger than James Dean, a couple of weeks a year is simply not enough time to comprehend what individuals must endure during their very short time on planet Koolan.

Northern Quoll are a great study species. This is not because they are an iconic, predatory mammal that is under severe threat of extinction, but because they have an amazing, complex and extremely brief life history.

A mother gives birth to several young, more than half of which are male. She nurtures them on the teat in the pouch for a few weeks and then deposits them in a den where she cares for them for several more weeks before they make their way out into the big bad world. Once independent they enjoy a very brief but accelerated period of growth as the bolster their body reserves before they hit sexual maturity and the breeding season begins. During the breeding season the females continue to build their body reserves while the males cease feeding and commence a copulatory marathon that will, ultimately, lead to their death within a few short months.

The ecological advantages for the population of male semelparity (death after a single year of mating) are obvious. The massive male die-off reduces competition for food between young emerging from the den and adults remaining in the population at the time of emergence.

The advantages of multiple matings are also pretty obvious. Multiple mating promotes sperm competition so only the best of the best swimmers make it to the egg. This should result in the fittest and strongest babies.

The cessation of feeding in males also reduces predation pressure and increase food availability right about the time that the females are trying to maximise their body condition in anticipation of parenting a batch of parasites that will literrally suck the life out of them.

The driver for multiple mating in the males is quite obviously a shift in hormone balance. But what happens when that balance shifts too far? Is it possible that the desire to mate multiple times in an effort to sire the greatest number of the fittest babies could decend into a voracious sex frenzy where females are seriously injured or even killed during sex?

As previously reported in this blog, the damaged caused by the males is intense, as they bite hard on the neck and grip the females tight in amplexus around the ribs, digging their claws in and causing quite significant injury. In 2016 I surveyed Northern Quoll in late June, no more than two months later than I normally would and I observed something that I had suspected; the males were merciless when it comes to copulation.

But what I saw in 2018 defies explanation and it sure as hell appears to serve absolutely no evolutionary purpose. During our survey we discovered a female that had been literally mated to death. The female was found in the immediate vicinity of a male; both were contained in a storage unit within which they had made their way.  As the photos clearly show the female has bite marks all around the neck and bite marks on the tail. There are also wear marks around the neck and front limbs from what I can only imagine is a savage amplexus.

What benefit can the individual, the population or the species derive from this sort of behaviour?? Is this a common occurrence in the wild or did it occur purely as a function of the situation?? Is it a case of Fishers Runaway Sexual Selection gone wrong?? That is, the drivers behind semelapirity have simply gone past the point of no return.  I dont know; I am not sure I want to know.

Who am I kidding, of course I want to know. Dont you?