On most nights you’ll find Dr Greg Brown, notebook in hand, walking the abandoned wall at Fogg Dam, a 45-minute drive east of Darwin.
It’s a walk the Macquarie University post-doctoral research fellow has taken more than 4,000 times over the past 22 years.
Into the notebook, Dr Brown is meticulously recording, to the best of his ability, all the animals he sees in the monsoonal floodplains — a landscape host to one of the world’s highest biomass of predator (water pythons) to prey (dusky rats) ratios.
“It turned into this monstrous, wonderful data set of activity of tropical animals,” Dr Brown says.
“A lot of the things that I see I just make a note of: there’s a water python, there is a death adder, there is a possum. But the things that I study more in depth, the keel backs [freshwater snakes] and the slaty-grey snakes — if I see one of them, I have to dart after it.”
True to his word, Dr Brown dives onto a pile of leaves and emerges with a snake, as a pair of wild buffalo and a freshwater crocodile watch on from the water.
“When I catch them I take them back to the lab and mark them — little scars on specific scales so I know who each individual is,” Dr Brown says.
“I know how much they have grown, what the average growth rate is, whether they had eggs and how many.
“When you get a lot of information from a lot of different snakes, then you can start to get a picture.”
Dr Brown’s interest in herpetology is far from a hobby — eminent biologist and Macquarie University Professor Rick Shine calls the researcher a “freakishly good field worker”.
“He’s been prepared to get out there on the dam wall every evening,” Professor Shine says.
“Night after night, year after year, to give us that really comprehensive data set on exactly what’s happening with fauna of the Top End across the last two decades.”
Read more here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-28/nt-cane-toad-researcher-greg-brown-fogg-dam/12279564
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