00:02You'd be lucky to spot a dragon at the best of times, but with fewer than a hundred grassland
00:07earless dragons in the wild, saving this Canberra critter is critical.
00:12It's really the only endemic vertebrate to the region.
00:15The grasslands get incredibly hot in summer, in the middle of summer we've recorded temperatures
00:18up to 70 degrees on the ground, which is incredibly lethal to a little dragon like this.
00:22To help them survive, researchers have DIY'd these dragon dens out of terracotta, made
00:27by a local ceramic artist.
00:29The clay is like the spider burrows the reptiles use for shelter and nesting.
00:34Yeah, when you see them in the burrow, they're curled up at the bottom.
00:36And after a month, they're showing promise.
00:39They've taken up the burrows quite quickly, which was a bit of a shock.
00:42We didn't know how it would work because these burrows mimic more of the natural burrows.
00:46It was good to see them use those over the PVC burrows.
00:51PVC pipes are used for monitoring and breeding programs, but clay holds moisture, which researchers
00:57hope will buffer climate impacts and incubate eggs.
01:00We're really looking to test them this year and it's also part of an intervention given
01:03the hot summer that we've got coming up.
01:05The ground's pretty insulated and having them around 20 centimetres provides a thermal gradient
01:09for them to shuttle up and down so they can get to the sort of desired temperature they
01:12want to be at.
01:13Shelter is only part of the challenge.
01:15These populations are becoming quite genetically isolated even though they're within the short
01:20distance.
01:21So it would be good to try and increase gene flow.
01:23There's hope that these clay creations will help this critically endangered reptile recover,
01:29building burrows for dragons to borrow.
