In a laboratory in the University of Melbourne earlier this year, PhD student Pierre Ibri was running an experiment that could prove to be a critical step in an audacious plan to save Australia’s endangered northern quoll.
In plastic trays were groups of tissue cells of another Australian marsupial – the common and mouse-like fat-tailed dunnart – that he was subjecting to the toxin of the cane toad, an invasive amphibian that has cut a swathe through populations of native animals in Australia’s north.
