Alex Paton

I didn’t plan on becoming a detective, but through my skills in programming, access to a classified database, and with 1000 spy-cameras, I stumbled into tracking Tasmania’s most notorious criminals… Cats!

I spend my days hiking through wilderness, four-wheel driving through forests, skimming over oceans in speedboats, or hopping in light aircrafts and flying to far-away islands to explore some of Tasmania’s most remote environments and track down these tricky felines.

My job is to figure out where cats are in Tasmania and what we can do about them. This kind of work is called invasive species management. This involves studying animals or plants that have been brought to a place they otherwise wouldn’t be in thanks humans. Notorious invasive criminals include black rats, blackberries, and, of course, cats. Managing these species involves figuring out where they are, how bad they are for the environment, and what we can do to fix the problem.

Before cats, I researched an invasive fish species called carp, and whether a disease could be used to control their populations. I also worked harmful algal blooms in the ocean, investigating if it is getting harder to eat shellfish, studied how climate change influences grassland plants, and monitoring animals through their poop.

As you can see, there’s a lot of variety in what I do. That’s because for me, science is all about interesting problems, and those can come from anywhere!