Ecologists fear the extent of the Tallaganda National Park fire's devastation will not be felt for some time.
"At the moment this region's got about half of its average rainfall, so this drought's a particularly bad one and so you add a wildfire after a period like that and you end up with really unchartered territory in terms of some of the wildlife behaviour."
A particular worry is the Tallaganda velvet worm, which has existed for millennia and has gradually been eliminated from the rest of Australia."The worm … actually evolved half a billion years ago. "It was much more widespread in Australia when Australia was a wetter continent, and of course it's retreated to all these wetter areas in the landscape, so conditions like this are going to be pretty tough for species like this to persist."
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