Fauna Monitoring

Citizen scientists were trained and deployed to gather water samples from across the Darebin Creek Catchment. Over 50 species were detected at the 12 sites. What is exciting is that the Australian short finned eel was detected at every site along the Darebin Creek just not in the Ivanhoe Wetland. This is a very interesting species as it spends part of its lifecycle in the Coral Sea and part in our Melbourne Waterways. What a trip! They are sensitive to pollution and sometimes that’s the way we find out about larger pollution events sadly. Ducks also are well represented in the survey results which are consistent with our regular sightings of them.

The frog results might look a little thin and that’s because frogs are mostly in water for breeding and each species have a different breeding time. We are currently surveying for Growling Grass Frogs using visual and sound recording methods to help fill the gap on this vulnerable species. Cows, pigs and chickens?! Most likely the DNA from these species come from run off from surrounding area as faeces. This provides us some great baseline data for future project