Canadian-born CSIRO entomologist Dr Jane Wright is not one of those people who believes retirement is an excuse to slow down.
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The energetic 60-year-old, who had cut her teeth as a field worker in ground breaking dung beetle research for the CSIRO in Africa in 1984, had been transitioned across to administration work long before her retirement about five years ago.
“I am retired in the sense that they don’t pay me,” she told Gang Gang.
“I am an honorary fellow in the CSIRO’s bio-security flagship and have been working on dung beetles. They are unfinished business.”
Dr Wright was in Western Australia this week overseeing the fruits of that half a decade of intensive research and study by masterminding the release of hundreds of French sourced dung beetles onto pastures in what locals call “the great southern”.
“It’s near to Kogonup if that helps.”
The CSIRO’s honorary fellowship program allows experienced scientific and technical staff with a keen interest in a particular field to keep on working on their specialty, after they have officially left the ranks of the paid workers.
“This [the fellowship] is my chance to revisit the project I joined the CSIRO to work on in the first place, all those years ago.
“It was something I never had a chance to finish the way I wanted.”
Australia’s dung beetle research was driven by the major changes to parts of the environment brought about by the introduction of European animals to the continent.
While this country has its own naturally evolved dung beetles they have neither the instincts, the ability or the inclination to tackle the challenges posed by a big, soggy cow pat.
“Australia’s dung beetles have evolved to work with the dung of the marsupials, which is very different,” Dr Wright said.
“I feel empathy for most insects but dung beetles have a particular appeal. They work with such gusto on something we think of as ‘icky’. The ancient Egyptians worshipped the dung beetle [as the scarab] and saw it as the god that rolled the sun across the sky.”
While the insects she and her colleagues have been so assiduously cultivating have a much humbler lot in life than Khepri, an ancient Egyptian god, they are still charged with mighty works and will help shape the destiny of the Australian continent.
“Dung beetles are easy to work with and you can do some really cool science [with them]. One of the things we look at is their beneficial impact on the soil. They dig holes, aerate it and then bring nutrient [in the form of the balls of dung] down into the roots where it is needed.
“The worms love it and most farmers love dung beetles, because they know what they can do.”
Dr Wright said the addition of the beetles, in this case the Onthophagus vacca species, to the landscape worked on many levels.
“When a cow drops a cow pat it does a number of things,” she said. “One of these is to actually smother the grass that is underneath. The nutrients [in the dung] can then leach out creating rank growth which doesn’t appeal to the stock.
“Our intention is to get a large number of dung beetles into a paddock so that as soon as a cow pat falls it has a lot of beetles working on it. The beetles push it, massage it, get the excess water off it and in the process destroy the larvae of flies that may have been laid on it.”
That has the additional advantage of helping to reduce fly numbers over time.
The dung beetles that have been released in Western Australia this week, have all been bred from the best imported French stock of beetles at the CSIRO’s Black Mountain Containment Facility.
