Colossal Sets Its Sights On a New Endangered Species to Save, The Northern Quoll

Australia’s spotted little hunter is getting a fresh start in North Queensland, with support from the Colossal Species Reintroduction Fund.

Every new town needs its founding families, and in the hills of North Queensland, many of the first settlers just arrived with babies tucked in their pouches. This September, Australian Wildlife Conservancy released its first wave of Northern Quolls into a feral predator-free haven at Mt Zero-Taravale Wildlife Sanctuary on Gugu Badhun Country. They are spotted, fearless little hunters roughly the size of a small cat—and the first arrivals are all females, many carrying the next generation.

Northern quolls live fast, and many males die after breeding season. The team times its collection efforts around that window, prioritizing females carrying pouch young as the colony’s founders. One trip, two generations.

Over two years, the team gathers up to 30 quolls from four wild populations, taking just a few from each to build a genetically diverse colony while minimizing the impact on the source populations. Each new resident is fitted with a telemetry collar, and motion-sensor cameras help monitor the 950-hectare site.

But here’s what makes this bigger than one sanctuary. The Northern Quoll population has been sliding since the 1930s, hammered by feral cats, bad fire regimes, and the cane toad; an invader so toxic that only one bite bite from a predator can kill it. Today the species is listed as Endangered. Inside this fence, none of that reaches them. “Creating a secure population within a feral predator-free fenced area provides greater certainty for the species’ future,” said Dr. Jennifer Anson, the AWC senior ecologist who led the reintroduction.

“We need northern quolls to have a balanced ecosystem in mainland Australia,” said Dr Andrew Pask, Chief Biology Officer at Colossal. The math is extraordinary: the founders could grow into as many as 300 quolls, and if AWC opens the gates to the wider sanctuary, another 20,000 hectares of habitat is waiting.

The Colossal Species Reintroduction Fund made the project possible - the same Colossal behind the woolly mammoth project and last year's dire wolf. Colossal is consistently putting real money behind living animals that need help now. It’s a natural pairing. While AWC builds the safe ground, Colossal is working with the University of Melbourne to research cane toad resistance in Northern Quolls, a potentially crucial aid for populations still living outside the fence. For AWC, it’s also one step closer to a 2035 goal of boosting threatened species reintroductions by 50 percent.

The people closest to the work sound less like scientists and more like proud neighbors. “We’re creating a stronghold for the species and restoring the local ecosystem by reinstating the quoll’s ecological role as a native predator to the sanctuary,” said Felicity L’Hotellier, the AWC senior field ecologist who carried out the release. Elsewhere on AWC land, the quoll recently turned up at Piccaninny Plains on Cape York after more than 80 years undetected; proof that this animal knows how to come back when given half a chance.

Nearly a century after the long decline began, a handful of mothers are finally raising the next generation somewhere the old threats can’t follow.