Have you ever wondered what creatures share your backyard? Meet the Marshall family from Tinderbox, south of Hobart, Australia, who recently embarked on an exciting journey to find out what animals live on their property.

Thanks to the Tasmanian Land Conservancy’s WildTracker project, a citizen science program, the family is discovering the fascinating array of wildlife that coexist with them!

Andrew Marshall and his daughters, Paige and Adia, installed a hidden camera in their yard, capturing awe-inspiring images of their animal neighbors.

They were already accustomed to seeing wallabies and the occasional echidna, but the camera revealed so much more. From eastern bettongs to pademelons and even a pair of wallabies engaged in a heated dispute, the camera captured all these amazing moments.

But it’s not just about wallabies and echidnas. The family is also hoping to spot the elusive forty-spotted pardalote, one of Australia’s most endangered birds. They’ve even set up bird boxes to encourage these rare birds to take up residence on their property.

The WildTracker project has so far attracted about 170 participants, who have submitted over 100,000 photos in total. The initiative aims to determine which creatures live where, track the range expansion of invasive species like the lyrebird and fallow deer, and monitor the spread of diseases, such as the devil facial tumor disease in Tasmanian devils.

Participants include both large landholders and those in more urban areas, making it a perfect opportunity for everyone to get involved. According to conservation ecologist Dr. Glen Bain, it’s vital to have people with smaller plots of land participate as well, as Tasmania still has unique wildlife living in suburban areas.

The project has led to some surprising discoveries, including the first-ever recorded sighting of a pygmy possum on camera. Carol Hurst, another participant, has captured images of quolls, mischievous owls, and Tasmanian devils on her property near Ranelagh.

She believes that discovering the wildlife living on her land has made her feel more connected to her surroundings and taught her to coexist with the creatures she shares her garden with.

So, why not join this fantastic project and learn more about the incredible wildlife in your backyard? The WildTracker project is open to anyone in Tasmania looking to contribute.

By participating, you’ll not only be educating yourself and your family about native wildlife, but also helping conservationists gather valuable information for preserving these amazing creatures.

This article by Nicholas Vincent was first published by OneGreenPlanet on 17 March 2023. 

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It’s not great when a person sucks all the oxygen out of a room. When a battery does it to a tumor, though, it could be a good thing.

A tiny self-charging battery wrapped around a tumor removes oxygen from the cancer cells’ environment, boosting the power of some cancer therapies, a study in mice shows. Mice that had small batteries wrapped around their breast cancer tumors, combined with cancer therapy, showed a 90 percent decrease in tumor volume in two weeks, researchers report March 31 in Science Advances. 

Solid tumors, such as those that can develop in breast cancer, often grow rapidly — so rapidly that the tumor’s growth is faster than its blood supply can support (SN: 5/10/17). This means that the center of many tumors can be hypoxic, with much lower oxygen levels than surrounding tissue.

“Hypoxia is a double-edged sword,” says materials scientist Yongyao Xia, who specializes in battery materials at Fudan University in Shanghai. Low oxygen levels in tumors mean that the body’s immune cells often cannot survive long enough to kill the cancerous cells (SN: 2/22/17). Hypoxic cells are also resistant to treatments like radiotherapy and even to traditional chemotherapies, as there isn’t enough blood flow to deliver a deadly dose, explains Fudan’s Fan Zhang, who studies biomedical materials.

“On the other hand, it provides a target for precision treatment of tumors,” Xia and Zhang write in the new paper.

The hypoxia could act as a beacon for chemicals called hypoxia-activated prodrugs. These are chemotherapeutic drugs hooked to a linking chemical that ensures the drug becomes active only in a low-oxygen environment, says Qing Zhang, a molecular biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who was not involved in the study.

But hypoxia-activated prodrugs don’t show much benefit in clinical trials, possibly in part because the solid tumors they are deployed against are not evenly hypoxic or not hypoxic enough. Xia and Fan Zhang wanted to find a way to make tumors more hypoxic, to give the prodrugs a better chance.

So the researchers and their colleagues deployed a tiny, flexible battery that could partially wrap around a tumor. The battery’s zinc electrode self-charges by sucking up oxygen from the environment. It also creates highly reactive oxygen pairs that can damage DNA but aren’t a usable form of oxygen for cells.

By slurping up most of the available oxygen and producing lots of reactive oxygen pairs, the battery alone was capable of shrinking tumors in mice by up to 26 percent of their original size two weeks after implantation. When combined with a hypoxia-activated prodrug, average tumor size shrank by 90 percent. 

“I think the concept, the scientific basis, is solid,” Qing Zhang says. The findings are encouraging, he says, but extremely preliminary. Not only were the batteries deployed only in mice, but they also were used against a mouse-specific breast cancer. “It has to be tested in several breast cancer models, and also has to be tested in other cancer models,” he says. And, of course, in humans.

And a 90 percent decrease in tumor size is not a 100 percent decrease. “There’s still 10 percent left,” Qing Zhang says. If those cells survive, it could mean they are resistant to the hypoxia, and the tumor could grow back. As with many treatments, he says, it will probably have to be combined with other therapies to make sure the whole tumor is zapped for good.

Xia, Fan Zhang and their colleagues are already thinking about how the battery might have to be made more flexible and more powerful to work on human-sized tumors — using battery energy to starve cancer of air.