Tag: Tasmania

Airport dogs can prevent invasive pests from entering new territories

Biosecurity inspectors and detector dogs are an effective combination in combatting the spread of invasive species.

Researchers at the University of Melbourne’s Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis (CEBRA) have highlighted biosecurity risks posed by air passengers and emphasised the value of border interventions such as detector dogs in mitigating these threats.

Published in the open-access journal NeoBiota, the study focused on domestic air travel into Tasmania, Australia, an island state with an especially low pest presence due to its geographic isolation.

Airport sign reading 'biosecurity Tasmania'

Researchers utilised an extensive database of more than 66,000 biosecurity risk interceptions from over 6 million passengers entering Tasmania from mainland Australia. With this, they applied advanced statistical modelling tools to assess how effective different interventions are at catching risky material at the border.  

Their analysis found that air passengers pose a significant biosecurity risk, with pests potentially introduced via items like fruits, vegetables, and animal products carried in luggage.

To combat this risk, border interventions using biosecurity inspectors and detector dogs were found to be effective, both by encouraging voluntary declarations by passengers and detecting risk items that passengers failed to declare.

While biosecurity inspectors play a significant role, detector dogs are especially effective, detecting a higher rate of risky items and targeting undeclared materials that might otherwise go unnoticed. The presence of detector dogs substantially increased interception rates, including for items linked to the spread of the invasive fruit fly.

Airport sign reading 'Help protect out beautiful island - biosecurity acheckpoint'

Lead author Dr Nicholas Moran said: “Dogs being great at sniffing things out might seem obvious, but measuring precisely how effective different interventions are, what they capture, and how, is incredibly valuable information for biosecurity operations.

“Fruit flies are a serious risk to Tasmania, and many parts of the world. So, this work is about knowing what biosecurity interventions to deploy, and where is best to deploy them to reduce the risk of outbreaks.”

The study is a part of the “Risk Analysis of Tasmanian Border Inspection Approaches and Procedures” project, conducted by CEBRA with Biosecurity Tasmania. The two-phase project investigated the invasive risk of five pest species that are common across Australia’s mainland but are not currently found in Tasmania.

Original study

Moran NP, Hanea AM, Robinson AP (2025) Border biosecurity interceptions for air passengers – assessing intervention methods and analytic tools. NeoBiota 97: 161-178. https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.97.141784

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The Venom Spider: new genus named after Tom Hardy’s Marvel character

Researchers referenced the British actor and Spider-Man villain due the unusual pattern on the Australian arachnid’s abdomen.

Venomius tomhardyi pictured next to an illustration of Tom Hardy’s Venom character.
Photo by Rossi et al. Illustration by Zeeshano0 via Pixabay.

Tom Hardy and his Marvel character Venom have given their names to a newly discovered Australian spider. The genus Venomius and its only current species Venomius tomhardyi were described following an expedition to Tasmania.

Scientists MSc Giullia Rossi, Dr Pedro Castanheira and Dr Volker Framenau from Murdoch University ( Perth, Australia) partnered with Dr Renner Baptista from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) to describe the new genus of orb-weaving spiders published in the open access journal Evolutionary Systematics.

Tom Hardy portrays Eddie Brock and his alter-ego Venom, an antihero closely associated with Spider-Man, across two Marvel films and gives his name to the sole species of the new genus. The distinctive black spots on the arachnid’s abdomen reminded the scientists of Venom’s head, inspiring them to select the unusual name.

Annotated image showing five angles of a spider.
Venomius tomhardyi male holotype. Scale bars: 2 mm (A, B); 0.2 mm (C–E).
Photos by Rossi et al.

The genus belongs to the Araneidae family of spiders, or Araneae, that build upright circular webs to capture prey. Despite resembling the related genus Phonognatha as both do not have tubercles on the abdomen, the newly described spiders are distinct in their behaviour of creating silk-lined holes in the branches of trees for shelter, as well as their different genitalia.

The holotype of the new species was discovered and subsequently preserved at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery following an expedition to Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia.

“This is part of a long-term research that aims to document the entire Australian spider fauna, which will be of extreme importance for conservation management plans and the continuation of the decadal plan for taxonomy and biosystematics in Australia and New Zealand.”

Dr. Pedro Castanheira, contributing author.
Distribution records of Venomius tomhardyi.
Image by Rossi et al.

Researchers also sourced supplementary specimens from scientific arachnology collections, with researchers examining approximately 12,000 records in Australian and overseas institutions.

“It is really important to keep describing new spiders to assess the total biodiversity of these predators in Australia,” added the study’s first author MSc Giullia Rossi.

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Original source:

Rossi GF, Castanheira PS, Baptista RLC, Framenau VW (2023) Venomius, a new monotypic genus of Australian orb-weaving spiders (Araneae, Araneidae). Evolutionary Systematics 7(2): 285-292. https://doi.org/10.3897/evolsyst.7.110022

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