Nearly 12 months of wildlife-camera footage from Litchfield National Park has turned up no northern quolls. Cameras did capture buffalo, pigs and cats. University of Melbourne PhD student Ryan Sauermann said the marsupial may be locally extinct in the region.
A search with no confirmed sightings
Sauermann deployed more than 30 cameras, recording more than 4,000 camera-trapping nights. He began the project hoping to establish a captive-breeding and rewilding colony. Now, the lack of detections has shifted the work toward finding out whether any quolls remain in the park and, if they don't, why.
Northern Territory Parks and Wildlife ranger Darius Nasir is assisting with the research. Nasir, a senior park ranger, said he used to see the nocturnal animals “almost every night,” but hadn't seen one for four or five years. He recalled, “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.
Sauermann said cane toads were largely to blame for the decline. “As the cane toad front moves through, we're losing 85 to 95 per cent [of the northern quoll population],” he said. He also pointed to changes in fire management and other feral species as major threats to the animals.
“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.” Northern quolls rank as “endangered” nationally and “critically endangered” in the Northern Territory.
Threats and efforts to find survivors
The study uses food-baited camera traps and reports from citizen scientists. Sauermann put up flyers around the park asking visitors to report sightings and contacted Facebook groups. So far, he said, those efforts have brought “very limited success.”
Sauermann has flown from Melbourne to the Top End “every couple of months” since late last year. He said he'd 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.
He described the carnivorous quoll as “probably one of the apex predators out here,” aside from dingoes. The animals manage insect and rodent populations. “They're massively important for the ecosystem,” Sauermann said.
Nasir said keeping quolls in northern Australia was “greatly important” and warned of an ecological snowball effect if they disappeared. “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 earlier in 2025 confirmed that spotted-tail and northern quolls were “functionally” extinct in large parts of Queensland, where introduced cane toads also pose an ecological threat.