Soil restoration can be expensive, and impractical across vast areas of land. Soil disturbance by echidnas offers a cost-effective restoration option, and this potential should be harnessed.
…one echidna moves about seven tonnes – about eight trailer loads – of soil every year.
This earth-moving capacity unwittingly provides another critically important function: matchmaking between seeds and water.
The italicised quotations come from an article in today’s edition of The Conversation by David John Eldridge, Professor of Dryland Ecology at the University of New South Wales.
It is worth reading, and is nicely illustrated.
(Featured image is copyright Doug Spencer – taken just before nightfall on 9 September 2020 in one of my favourite West Australian places. My beloved and I have visited Dryandra Woodland many times, and we have never failed to see at least one echidna there. You need good luck and favourable weather to see Dryandra’s emblematic numbats, but to see echidnas you just need to be alert, reasonably quiet…and aware of wind direction. Your chances are much better if you are downwind from an echidna’s very keen nostrils)