and the short beaked echidna, an egg laying creature which is the world s oldest surviving mammal. everyone loves echidnas, and echidnas are really good in the environment. both echidnas and goannas are our natural gardeners. so they re very, very good. they re both diggers, that means they are cultivating the soil, they are turning over the soil, and they are helping the natural environment actually spread. just days after the worst fires in living memory reduced much of the island s bushland to ash, dr rismiller discovered the first vital signs of recovery. immediately after the fire we still found invertebrate life. we still found the ants, the termites, the spiders. all of those were also food sources for other things. there were areas of refuge, areas that didn t burn, where animals did take refuge,
it s great that they can hold a feral cat and not damage native wildlife. at the far end of the island, untouched by the fires of black summer, wildlife is flourishing. this is a map of kangaroo island showing where the fires occurred, this last year, and the colours, they show you the intensity of the fire in a lot of area. so the western end of the island, you can see there was some very, very intense burns. but there were also some areas that didn t burn. so there were some refuges for the wildlife to escape some of this. here we go, echidnas. dr peggy rismiller has been studying the wildlife of kangaroo island for more than 35 years, with a particularfocus the island s largest natural predator, the rosenberg s goanna, which can live several decades,