The species is listed as endangered under Australia’s national environment law, and the federal government names cane toads, more frequent and severe fires, feral cats and overgrazing by feral herbivores as key threats. The 2020 study calls the Pilbara the last remaining stronghold for the species, likely because cane toads have not reached it. But more than 91 percent of the region is under mining lease, and the rocky outcrops where quolls den are rich in iron ore and gravel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Earlier dens got the heat right<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
That 2020 study in Conservation Science and Practice<\/a>, led by Cowan at Charles Sturt University, compared 10 dens used by quolls, 10 empty crevices nearby and 10 artificial dens that mining companies had built, mostly between 2012 and 2015, from piled waste rock or concrete slabs and gravel. Over 2,526 trap nights, quolls turned up at only five of the 10.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The artificial dens matched occupied ones for temperature but had shallower cavities, less complex surrounding habitat, more feral cat visits and less small mammal prey, the researchers wrote. One logged more than 100 separate feral cat detections, including a cat going in and out with kittens, and the team warned that such dens could act as “ecological traps,” places animals choose because they look good but that in fact harm them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A later study at Woodie Woodie, a manganese mine in the eastern Pilbara, fitted 12 quolls with GPS collars and motion sensors in 2021 and 2022. In the breeding season the animals avoided mine pits and waste dumps. Outside it, they used mining habitats about as much as rocky and riparian ones, but at a higher energetic cost, the authors wrote in Movement Ecology<\/a> in 2024. One collared male was killed by a feral cat on a waste rock dump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In September 2022, AWC announced<\/a> that 12 trial dens built from pipes, rock and rubble were going in at its Brooklyn Wildlife Sanctuary, north of the Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland. Andrew Dennis of Terrain NRM said in the release that, unlike earlier artificial dens on rehabilitating mine sites, these would be built in undisturbed areas, with a design based on natural den depth, temperature and humidity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “If this trial works, the lessons learnt could be applied in the Northern Territory and in Western Australia, where there is an ongoing rapid decline,” Dennis said. Built structures can draw wildlife back in other places too, as when two artificial reefs off Western Australia grew to more than 60 fish species<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ladyman and Pettit ask for replicated trials to test how well HDPE pipes work as dens and to find the best design and placement of the pipes in relation to surrounding landscape features and microclimate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Cowan’s 2020 work, a den counted as occupied only with evidence of regular use by female quolls, and those dens were often photographed with young. That is the bar a buried pipe still has to clear. The Woodie Woodie team also urged protection of favored rocky and riparian habitats wherever mining is active.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shelters on industrial land sometimes get used in ways nobody planned, as when burrowing owls hatched 36 chicks in artificial tunnels at an Arizona solar farm<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPipes, rock and rubble in Queensland<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Artificial](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/pipe-den-brooklyn-sanctuary.jpg\")
What the pipes still have to prove<\/h2>\n\n\n\n