There are three known wild contagious cancers in vertebrates, and endangered Tasmanian devils have two of them.
an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at Eight years ago, I first met with researchers from the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program in Tasmania, Australia, to learn about their work to protect the endangered marsupials.
“It was a big surprise. We thought that transmissible cancers were really rare—like lightning striking—and that devils were just a very unfortunate species,” says Elizabeth Murchison, who researches genetic and transmissible cancers at the University of Cambridge in England. It’s likely that DFT1 and DFT2 weren’t the first cancers to emerge in devils and are unlikely to be the last.
Rollout is still several years away, but devils no longer appear to be at imminent risk of extinction. Exact numbers are unknown, but thanks in part to pilot projects to improve genetic diversity through the release of healthy devils, their population is holding strong in many areas—at least for now.
“If you’ve only got five breeding females in a small population and two get hit by cars on the road, you’ve lost 40 percent of your breeding population in one event,” says Hogg. Since then, the STDP has done 11 more releases of healthy Tasmanian devils throughout the state to improve genetic diversity of existing wild populations. What’s changed is that instead of releasing devils bred in captivity, it now relies on the wild offspring of the disease-free population on Maria Island. A national park where there are no cars , Maria Island has wild devils that aren’t habituated to the sound of traffic and are more likely to survive.
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