Description

A medium-sized mammal slightly smaller than a rabbit and bearing some resemblance to a bandicoot, Gilbert's Potoroo has a dense coat of soft grey-brown fur. The tail is lightly furred, and curls up tightly when the animal is at rest. When standing, the animal has a hunched appearance and its eyes appear to look obliquely upwards. The sides of the face are furred giving the appearance of heavy jowls and the snout is slender, curving slightly downwards as in other potoroos. The ears are rounded and almost completely buried in the fur.

The forefeet have long curved claws, forming strong digging appendages that are also able to handle food items with great dexterity. The hindfeet are long, as in the other members of the kangaroo family. Gilbert's Potoroos place their fore-feet on the ground when moving slowly, but hop on their hindfeet when moving rapidly.

• Weight: Adult males, 1100g, adult females 900g
• Head and body length 270 mm
• Tail length 210 mm

Potoroos belong to a small family called the Potoroidae (rat-kangaroos), within the large superfamily Macropodoidea. The rat-kangaroos are small marsupials which hop on their hindfeet, dig for much of their food with well-developed forefeet, and have a complex stomach that allows them to extract nutrition very efficiently from their diet. The Potoroidae contains several small genera, including Bettongia, (the bettongs, such as the burrowing bettong and the brush-tailed bettong) and Potorous, containing the potoroos.

Altogether, five types of potoroo have been described. Two of these, Potorous tridactylus apicalis, from Tasmania, and Potorous tridactylus tridactylus, from South-eastern Australia, are regarded as subspecies of the Long-nosed Potoroo
P.tridactylus. In wet forests of Gippsland in Victoria and southern New South Wales, a few hundred Long-footed Potoroos Potorous longipes hang tenuously onto existence. The Broad-faced Potoroo Potorous platyops was the only potoroo known to live in semi-arid habitats, but no living animals have been recorded since the 1870s, although the sub-fossil remains that have been found show that it was widely distributed in southern and western coastal parts of Australia. Gilbert's Potoroo Potorous gilbertii is the fifth member of this exclusive group.

Threatening Processes

The most significant threats to the survival of Gilbert's Potoroo have been identified as:

Fire
The only known wild population of Gilbert's Potoroo exists in dense, long unburnt vegetation that is potentially highly vulnerable to wildfire. Fire exclusion is thus an extremely high priority in the protection of the wild population. The captive colony was established at least partly to provide insurance against the loss of the single known population through a catastrophic fire event.

Feral predators
Gilbert's Potoroo is within the Critical Weight Range (35g to 5kg) of mammals thought to be most susceptible to decline. It is in the prey size range of both Foxes and Cats, both of which are known to occur in the Two Peoples Bay area. Dietary analysis of the gut contents and faeces of a feral Cat trapped at Mt Gardner in 2001 revealed that it had consumed both Quenda (Bandicoot) and Noisy Scrub-bird. Control of feral Cats would thus also be beneficial to other threatened mammals and birds in the area.

Dieback disease Phytophthora cinnamomi
Potoroos are believed to be present only in areas of the Reserve that are free of Dieback infection which can cause considerable changes to the floristic structure of the habitat. Gilbert's Potoroo feeds primarily on hypogeal fungi, many of which are mycorrhizal. Plant dieback disease is considered to be a major threat to the continued survival of the potoroo by altering vegetation structure or eliminating species that are hosts to the mycorrhizal fungi on which they feed.

Clearing of vegetation adjacent to Two Peoples Bay
The population of Gilbert's Potoroo on the Mount Gardner headland has the potential to expand through the dispersal of young through adjacent bushland corridors into suitable habitat nearby (especially near Mount Manypeaks). Some of this linking bushland occurs on private land. Unless these corridors are protected from clearing, the chance of successful dispersal to new areas will be very small.