The fast-track panel considering the giant goldmine at Bendigo planned by Santana Minerals yesterday heard from leading New Zealand herpetologist Mandy Tocher, who was discussing lizards and geckos. She was out of the country last week when discussions took place about ecology.
Ms Tocher was giving evidence on behalf of the Department of Conservation.
Much debate has been centred on the ecology of the site and how habitat will be maintained and how many lizards or skinks would survive if relocated to another area in the site.
Ms Tocher said if you remove grass seed off pastures, mice numbers would erupt. Mice predators would come in and lizard numbers would plummet as they were eaten by predators.
She worked for six years in Stewart Island and there were no mice initially at that site. But there was intermittent mast seedings, which drove ship rats up to the site.
‘‘Norway rats, I don’t know why, they would just leave them [skinks] alone. Just did not happen.
‘‘But the ship rats, just stripped them to skeletons.
‘‘Mice are just mean, and it is the elephant in the room here. Unless the applicant can control mice, there is not going to be any uplift at any of the sites.’’
She said there was no landscape scale mice control method in New Zealand.
The target to control mice was not to get them to zero, but getting them down to 5% could be enough. The 5% calculation was a complicated method which revolved around spaced tunnel tracks and mice markings.
‘‘We all agree you put the fence where there is hardly any mice. That is the best way to handle mice.’’
When asked about the movement of lizards and skinks she said sometimes salvage was not worth it.
‘‘It pains me to say it, salvage is not worth it if you have another option.’’
‘‘The population monitoring might say it, that instead of moving it around ... you might be better off putting a fence and sealing off some of the effects.’’
Santana needed to make sure their monitoring was enough. They had to get release sites and get it right and the animals had to go into fenced sites.
She said geckos and lizards were pretty cool animals. She did not want to repeat what she had said but ‘‘the effect things had been undercooked ... the focus on just 610km does not seem quite right to me.’’
It was a case of getting life history traits of each species and putting it into a simple model and then work out how long it would take to grow the population to a certain number.
From there you could just pick the habitat needed. Some of the sites at the Santana were not considered because of commercial reasons.
