Australia’s largest marsupial carnivore fights a contagious cancer
Sarcophilus harrisii, the Tasmanian devil, vanished from mainland Australia about 3,500 years ago and now survives on Tasmania. Stocky as a small dog yet able to hit thirteen kilometres per hour, it faces a newer threat than hunters: devil facial tumour disease since the late 1990s.
George Harris published the first description in 1807, mistaking it for a bear-eared opossum as Didelphis ursina; the species name harrisii stuck after later revisions rejected a 1987 bid to swap it for fossil-based S. laniarius. The 2010 genome from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute showed fourteen chromosomes like other dasyurids and unusually low genetic diversity consistent with founder bottlenecks. MHC surveys still find richer northern patterns than eastern ones.
Usually solitary, they sometimes share feeding and latrine sites. Better daytime thermoregulation than most dasyurids lets them forage at noon without overheating. Females average four breeding seasons, delivering twenty to thirty pea-sized pink young after three weeks—yet only four pouch nipples mean brutal lottery survival. Adults finish growing by two; few wild animals pass five years, though captive Coolah lived past seven.
Official protection arrived in 1941. DFTD nevertheless crashed numbers so hard that endangered status followed in 2008; insurance populations and mainland reintroductions began around 2013. As the largest living carnivorous marsupial, with forelegs slightly longer than hind, the devil’s scavenging scream remains Tasmania’s ecological signature—and a conservation race against a clonally spreading facial cancer.
Communal feeding dens amplify the screams that earned colonial folklore, yet the same close contact helps DFTD clone jump hosts. Low MHC diversity leaves little immunological wiggle room, so managers bank disease-free insurance populations and test vaccine strategies while mainland trials cautiously restore an apex scavenger missing for millennia. Pemberton’s climbing-ancestor speculation even ties the odd gait to arboreal pasts. Saving purinina means treating a contagious cancer as ecology’s newest predator.
Source: Tasmanian devil
