Traditional hunting seems to boost lizard populations in Australia.
Rebecca Bliege Bird at Stanford University, California, and her colleagues found that numbers of sand monitor lizards (Varanus gouldii) in the Western Desert were largest where there was most hunting — lizard burrows were present in 13% of hunted plots but in only 7% of plots with least hunting. Aboriginal hunters burn small patches of land, thus promoting habitat that favours V. gouldii and apparently outweighing the loss of individual lizards to Aboriginal dinner plates.
The authors suggest that extinctions of native species in the Australian desert might be linked to a decline in traditional hunters, whose cultural 'Dreaming' knowledge stresses the importance of human-made fires to the health of the landscape.
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Hunting leads to a leap in lizards. Nature 502, 596 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/502596a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/502596a
