A CELEBRATION OF THE HISTORY, CULTURE, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF RECHERCHE BAY
CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research Auditorium Hobart, Tasmania
26–28 February 2007

“J’étais convaincu qu’il dormait” European views of a unique Australian mammal
Associate Professor Stewart Nicol

Stewart Nicol was born in Launceston and studied Zoology and Geology at the University of Tasmania, being awarded first class honours in Zoology in 1968 for a study of thermoregulation and metabolism in native rodents. After a brief stint as a teacher he joined the Medical School as Demonstrator in Physiology where he continued his research on native mammals, being awarded a PhD in 1978 for work on temperature regulation and metabolism of marsupials. He became Head of Anatomy of Physiology in 1999, and was Deputy Head of the School of Medicine from 1998 until 2005. At the start of 2007 he will be moving to the School of Zoology at the University of Tasmania. His research interests became focused on the biology of monotremes, or egg-laying mammals. He believes that the biological significance of the platypus and the echidna, in particular, is greatly under appreciated in Australia. Modern instrumentation techniques now allow a range of information on undisturbed animals in their normal habitats to be obtained and he is using a range of such techniques to study all aspects of the field biology of echidnas.

The French expedition of 1792 was one of a series of voyages of discovery to the southern hemisphere by Europeans, which for the French began in 1756 when Emperor Louis XV sent Louis-Antoine de Bougainville to look for the southern lands.

One of the most epic of these was the voyage of La Coquille (1822–1825). With Louis Isidore Duperrey as commander and Dumont d'Urville as second in command, La Coquille sailed 125,000 km and crossed the equator six times, collecting vast quantities of scientific specimens in South America and the Pacific. Chief naturalist on this voyage was Rene Primevere Lesson, assisted by Prosper Garnot, who was also assistant surgeon. Illness forced Garnot to leave La Coquille while in Sydney, and while waiting for a ship to return him to France, he bought an echidna which had been raised in captivity. Garnot kept the echidna in his cabin on his return voyage, and was the first European to record hibernation in this species.

For many years echidna hibernation was considered to demonstrate that this was a primitive mammal, physiologically somewhere between reptiles and true mammals. Hibernation is now considered to be an energy saving adaptation found in a wide range of mammals, and in northern hemisphere mammals, hibernation is a response to cold and lack of food. Echidnas hibernate even though there may be sufficient food for them throughout the year, entering hibernation in late summer, and arousing in early winter. Our work suggests that for echidnas hibernation is an adaptive response to a low energy environment and unreliable climate.