Observations on a Population of Small Marsupials in Tasmania

The marsupial fauna of Tasmania is well known from the taxonomic standpoint, and the geographical range of the species both in Tasmania and on the mainland of Australia is also known in some detail. However, the distribution of many of the marsupials within Tasmania is very imperfectly understood and there are many pressing problems in this regard yet to be solved. There has never been any attempt to investigate either the movements of individual animals or the microdistribution of one or more species in any one area of Tasmania. As far as I am aware the work being carried out at Canberra by Dunnet of C.S.I.R.O. is the only attempt at such studies in the southern or eastern States of Australia. The macrodistribution of several of our Tasmanian species has been worked out in more or less detail. The distribution of the brush possum, Trichosurus vulpecula, was described by Pearson (1938), Huxley (1938, 1942), and more recently by Guiler (1953) and Guiler and Ingram (1958). In all of these investigations the raw material on which the distribution curves were based was derived from fur industry statistics.