More than 30 wildlife cameras and over 4,000 camera-trapping nights at Litchfield National Park have recorded buffalo, pigs and cats. No northern quolls have appeared. University of Melbourne PhD student Ryan Sauermann says the marsupial may be locally extinct in the region, with introduced predators, cane toads and fire-management changes pressing against a species listed as endangered nationally and critically endangered in the Northern Territory.
A disappearance caught on camera
Sauermann began the project hoping to establish a captive-breeding and rewilding colony. Now he’s trying to answer a more basic question: do northern quolls remain in the park, and if they don’t, why? The cameras haven’t answered the first question with certainty, but they’ve documented the animals that do appear. Still no quolls.
Northern Territory Parks and Wildlife senior ranger Darius Nasir said the change reaches beyond the cameras. He recalled seeing quolls “almost every night,” but said he hadn’t seen one for four or five years. “Around 2009, 2010, I used to see them all the time around my house … my dogs would be going off and it'd be quolls, quite abundant quolls back then,” he said.
The pressures on the ground
Sauermann identified cane toads as a major cause of the decline. “As the cane toad front moves through, we're losing 85 to 95 per cent [of the northern quoll population],” he said. That toll comes alongside changes to fire management and other feral species, threats that leave quolls bearing the cost of decisions and conditions they don’t control.
“More frequent burns tend to be worse for the quolls as well,” Sauermann said. “The introduction of feral predators — cats especially — are a big issue.” Camera traps have recorded cats in the park, while the quoll remains absent from the footage. The species’ national and Northern Territory listings formally recognise its endangered status, but they haven’t made the threats disappear.
The research also uses food-baited camera traps and reports from visitors. Sauermann has put up flyers around the park asking people to report sightings and contacted Facebook groups. So far, he said, the response has brought “very limited success.”
Searching, and what stands to be lost
Sauermann has flown from Melbourne to the Top End “every couple of months” since late last year, and says he’ll keep searching. “Just because we're not finding anything right now doesn't mean that they're not here, doesn't mean we should stop looking,” he said. His project has shifted from planning a colony to establishing whether researchers can still find a wild population.
The search matters beyond one animal. Sauermann described the carnivorous quoll as “probably one of the apex predators out here,” aside from dingoes, and said quolls help manage insect and rodent populations. They’re “massively important for the ecosystem.”
Nasir warned that losing quolls could trigger an ecological snowball effect. “If we lose these quolls, we won't see them again — it'll [be like the bloody thylacine],” he said. “We've got too many extinct animals around already as it is, let alone [adding] another one.”
Sauermann urged pet owners to keep dogs and cats away from wildlife, help protect the environment and limit fire risk. “There's so much more out there than I think people realise and just getting people interested would be a huge, huge win,” he said. Research in 2025 also confirmed that spotted-tail and northern quolls were “functionally” extinct in large parts of Queensland, where introduced cane toads pose an ecological threat.