Possums and wallabies intent on raiding Australian gardens and forestry plantations in search of a succulent shoot or two will soon face a wee problem - dingo urine.
Scientists have found that the urine of Australia's native wild dog acts as a powerful deterrent to the marsupials.
Researchers
hope to come up with a synthetic equivalent which can then be produced on a commercial scale.
It would provide a harmless alternative to poisons such as cyanide and 1080 which timber companies currently deploy to stop marsupials.
The poisons kill millions of kangaroos, wallabies and possums each year, many of them dying a painfully slow death.
A team led by Dr Michael Parsons, of Curtin University in Western Australia, has found that dingo urine - made into a gel - repels all but the most determined animals.
During trials in Tasmania, 80 per cent of possums and 78 per cent of wallabies steered clear of areas marked by the gel.
Dingoes never reached Tasmania, but it is thought the urine triggered a response similar to that which would have been produced by encountering a Tasmanian tiger, prior to the species' extinction in the 1930s.
A "urine barrier" kept kangaroos away from a garden full of rose beds for a month. Film footage showed them freezing about 5m from the garden's edge, before turning tail.
The raw urine was collected from animals kept at the Australian Dingo Conservation Association in Canberra, and flown fresh to Perth. But its limited supply - there are only a few dingoes in captivity, and pure-bred dingoes are a vanishing breed in the wild because of inter-breeding with feral dogs - means the gel is costly.
A 40ml bottle costs A$20 ($25) to produce - hence the necessity to come up with an artificial replica.
Researchers found dingo urine contains a complex range of chemicals.
The project was awarded a A$1.6 million grant. The gel is likely to be of interest not only to timber companies but also gardeners fed up with the marauding of their local possum population.
