Animal splits

of protein for the mountain pygmy possum, a tiny 45 g possum and the only mammal unique to alpine and subalpine areas of Australia. Pygmy possums have a range totalling less than ten square kilometres and almost entirely coincident with Australian ski resorts, so it is perhaps fortuitous for them that they hibernate during the winter. Winter-active mammals, like the dusky antechinus (a carnivorous marsupial mouse), the common bush rat and the broad toothed rat, survive the cold by foraging in a network of corridors formed under the snow by the understorey in which temperatures remain relatively stable all winter. The cold mountain streams are home to a species of fish, the mountain galaxia, that uses specialised fins to climb over rocks, enabling these fish to seek out better water sources in difficult times. Once widespread but now restricted to alpine and sub-alpine pools because of competition from the introduced brown trout, they sun themselves on rocks, and were once even observed lying on the ice, to regulate their body temperature. The alps were once an important region for indigenous Australians and there are many traces of their use. The Birrigai Shelter was used by them as far back as 21,000 years ago and last used by them in the mid-nineteenth century. As well as eating bogong moths, they developed a technique of 'farming' possums by making traps in hollow trees. Possibly the rarest species found in the alps — the two and a half centimetre long, yellow and black striped southern corroboree frog — is listed as critically endangered under IUCN classification, and there are thought to be fewer than one thousand remaining in the wild. These brightly coloured, diminutive frogs were once abundant and famous for their grunting calls, but over the past thirty years their numbers have dropped dramatically due to infection by the chytrid fungus and probably also many years of drought. The name corroboree is an aboriginal word for meeting or gathering and their range coincides with an area where tribes would gather to feast on bogong moths in the summer, adding their own corroboree to the chorus of mating frogs. Now neither gathering is audible, though a few frogs, at least, remain. Europeans have been rethinking their attitudes towards animals this year, particularly their closest relatives: the great apes. In the summer, the environment committee of the Spanish parliament voted to grant limited rights …