Categories
Australian Animals Photography

This is not a quoll. It is a dugite, one of Australia’s many highly venomous snakes. It is brown and speckled.

The Atlas of Living Australia is a comprehensive database of species of animals, plants and fungi with location information. So, for instance, if you want to see if someone’s neighbourhood is infested with horribly poisonous spiders and snakes, whack that person’s postcode into the ALA’s handy lookup tool and see what natural science has to say.

When i put my postcode in, as well as dugiltes our old friend the chuditch came up. The data has been obfuscated somewhat but what that tells me is that chuditches have lived within 20km of my house this century. This pleases me, although the prevalence of feral cats and foxes and feral dogs (as opposed to dingos) does not.

Categories
Australian Animals Photography

This is not a quoll. It is a dugite having a yawn.

According to this list, the dugite is the only snake in Australia which has less potent venom than a non-Australian snake. Poor not-as-toxic-as-a-cobra babbu.

Categories
Australian Animals Photography

This is not a quoll. It is a dugite (or rather several dugites), one of the most venomous snakes on the planet. Like the tiger snake, this one’s local to me and i’ve seen one in the wild, but it’s much more shy than the tiger snake.

The dugite display at Armadale Reptile Centre has a great breakdown of why it makes no economic sense to kill dugites – basically, dugites are excellent at catching rodents, rodents eat grain, grain that gets eaten can’t be sold for money. Therefore each dugite over the course of its life is worth at least half a million dollars. So when you kill a dugite, you kill for communism. Or something.

Also you’ll get a fine.

Categories
Australian Animals Photography

This is not a quoll but it is a vertebrate. It is a dugite, one of the venomous snakes in this part of the country. Dugite bites have killed humans as recently as 1993 and their venom is more potent than a king cobra’s. Fortunately dugites are not aggressive compared with other species of brown snake, and they are pleasantly speckled to boot.

The last wild dugite i saw was at a school camp in the early 1990s. One of the teachers cut its head off with an axe.

The word dugite is derived from Noongar; in standard Noongar spelling it is dookatj.