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Tasmanian Devil: A Unique and Threatened Animal

Natural History, Sept, 2006 by Laurence A. Marschall

Tasmanian Devil: A Unique and Threatened Animal by David Owen and David Pemberton Allen & Unwin, 2006; $24.95

Whoever coined the phrase "big things come in small packages" may have been thinking of the Tasmanian devil. Although the little marsupial weighs no more than about twenty-five pounds, its ferocity is the stuff of legend. They say its teeth are sharp enough to devour a horse, bones and all. They say it hunts in packs, relentlessly chasing down even the largest prey, and leaves nothing behind. They say it reeks of death, and that those who have encountered a devil in the wild--if they live to tell about it--never forget its awful smell.

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But don't believe everything "they" tell you. According to David Owen, a Tasmanian novelist, and David Pemberton, a zoologist and curator at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart, only a little is known about devil behavior in the wild, but it's clear that most of the tales of terror are exaggerations. In truth, the Tasmanian devil is generally a timid creature. Although its jaws are strong and its bite can be deadly, it is an opportunistic omnivore, not a vicious predator. Roadkill, dead fish, and fat wombats are staples of its diet, with tadpoles and moths added as garnish.

Another myth is that devils hunt in packs. In fact, they prefer the solitary chase; their reputation for wolflike vigilantism may have arisen from their tendency to dine with friends. When a devil encounters a substantial carcass, a possum, say, or a young sheep, it signals its neighbors with loud shrieks, so that all can share the bounty. The sight of these small, active creatures tearing gobbets of flesh while screaming at each other may present a distressing tableau, but it's no more cause for alarm than a flock of crows or vultures pecking at a fresh corpse.

In spite of their bad reputation, Tasmanian devils have had their champions over the years. One of the most unlikely was a well-to-do Victorian animal fancier named Mary Grant Roberts, who began breeding and nurturing captive devils in a private zoo in Hobart in the late 1800s. She kept several families of devils, and wrote perceptively of their feeding, breeding, and social habits. "I, who love them, and have had considerable experience in keeping most of our marsupials," Roberts wrote in 1915, "will always regard them as first favourites, my little black playmates." Roberts's motherly enthusiasm for Tasmanian devils was matched by the scientific attraction they exerted on a Tasmanian biology professor named Theodore Thomson Flynn, the father of the actor Errol Flynn. The elder Flynn was the first to describe the anatomy and physiology of the devil in meticulous detail.

Still, much remains to be learned about devils. They are hard to observe in the wild, and only a few professionals study them--among them Pemberton. Farmers continue to view them as a menace, and though the bounty on them, imposed in the 1800s, is no longer in place, devils have been adversely affected by human development on their remote island home. Yet at the same time, the devil has become a popular symbol of Tasmania, celebrated locally in tourist brochures and worldwide as the Warner Brothers cartoon character Taz. On balance, the will to protect the devil is there, but the way remains unclear.

In recent years an alarming new element has entered the picture: a grim affliction known as devil facial tumor disease, or DFTD. First recognized by a wildlife officer named Nick Mooney in 1996, the disease deforms, then kills. No one knows what causes DFTD--virus, environmental pollutant, invasive microorganism, or, as most recently suggested, allograph transmission, whereby an infectious cell line passes directly from one animal to another through a bite--but it may ultimately determine whether the Tasmanian devil makes it in the wild. Tracking its cause and finding a cure is the most urgent item on the agenda for the human advocates of this remarkable marsupial.

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.

Tasmanian Devil: A Unique and Threatened Animal

Natural History, Sept, 2006 by Laurence A. Marschall

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