Are Tasmanian devils doomed? Monday's suspenseful ANU seminar on this worrying subject was given some of the dramatic qualities of a Nordic noir (Tasmanic noir?) TV drama by the expert speaker's announcement that she wasn't going to answer the stark question until the very end of her talk.
And matters got off to an anxious start. Dr Janine Deakin, Associate Professor of Genetics at the University of Canberra told her audience at the ANU's Research School of Biology that of course one would have to have been "living under a rock" not to know that the devils are being ravaged by a terrible facial cancer. But even if we were well out from under that rock, she continued, we might not know that now alas a second, different facial tumour has been found among some devils.
And so the famously pugnacious carnivorous species (its common names include Satanic Meatlover and Satan's Puppy) already thought in grave danger of extinction in the wild, is even more menaced than we thought.
And the fact that a new facial tumour can just arise among devils, Dr Deakin continued, somehow managing to look and sound cheerful, raises some worries about the "insurance population" of devils being kept away from Tasmania. She thinks it will be "devastating" if yet another DFT arises among these sheltered devils.
This was a very scholarly presentation with graphs galore about chromosomes and their telomeres? ("Devil's chromosome are weird!" Dr Deakin marvelled to us) but the non-scientists among us got also some very vivid mental pictures of effervescent devil life from Dr Deakin's talk.
So for example she explained that these transmissible cancers are so readily transmitted in part because devils are always biting one another. They give one another love-gnaws when mating and there's lots of partially "playful" biting of one another when ripping into shared meals of flesh.
At this point up came an unforgettable picture of a typical Satanic Meatlover tearing a roadkilled something to shreds.
Dr Deakin admitted that there is so much that we don't know about why the devils suffer from these tumours. Is it because they do so much biting of each other? Is there a special fragility about their chromosomes? Is there (this speculation raised a few scholarly titters) something about Tasmania (the devils' environment)? She wondered if it might be some "lethal combination" of all of these things?
But, seemingly against the dark, Tasmanic noir odds she'd spent an hour outlining, Dr Deakin chose to finish on a qualifiedly optimistic note.
Were devils doomed?
"Well, devils have been quite resilient in the past. Yes, they did go extinct on the mainland ... but in Tasmania they've always seemed to bounce back."
She explained that some of her shy hopes are pinned on "evolution", on something none of us in Monday's seminar room will live to see. She dreams that evolution's "selection" will in time teach today's belligerent, satanic devils "to become more angelic ... to love each other and not bite each other".
