The role of quoll (Dasyurus) predation in the outcome of pre-1900 introductions of rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) to the mainland and islands of Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigated two questions: Why did most historical releases of rabbits on the Australian mainland fail? And why did many releases of rabbits on islands around Australia persist? We reviewed historical sources and present here nearly 300 records of the importation, sale, transportation and release of rabbits in the period 1788–1900, with >90 records before the popularly cited 1859 Barwon Park (near Geelong, Victoria) release by Thomas Austin. Similarly, we present records of localised impact of quolls (especially Dasyurus viverrinus) on rabbits and poultry, indicative of the great abundance of quolls. Rabbits were often imported and traded and releases were frequent and widespread. This evidence implicates native predators, particularly quolls (Dasyurus spp.) as responsible for the widespread and early failure of rabbits to establish on mainland Australia. In contrast, rabbits thrived on many islands, nearly all of which lacked cursorial natural enemies. We suggest that these accounts support the establishment of rabbits from several locations, with Barwon Park being a primary location and rabbit source.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".