Saving the Tasmanian Devil: The Conservation Story of the Decade

The Tasmanian devil's survival has been the most urgent and most intensively managed wildlife conservation challenge in Australia over the past two decades, as the devil facial tumour disease (DFTD) that began spreading through the devil population in the 1990s decimated the species across most of its range and raised the prospect of the extinction in the wild of the world's largest carnivorous marsupial. The disease, a transmissible cancer that spreads between devils during the biting that social encounters involve, kills infected animals within months and has reduced the wild population by more than 80 percent across most of Tasmania.

The Save the Tasmanian Devil Program, the joint initiative of the Tasmanian and Australian governments and the conservation community, has pursued the twin strategies of maintaining an insurance population of disease-free devils in managed facilities and on Mainland Australia, and of developing treatments and management approaches that might allow the wild population to survive and recover. The insurance population program, which established colonies of devil populations on the mainland at sites including the Barrington Wildlife Sanctuary in NSW, provides the genetic reservoir that would allow reintroduction to Tasmania if the wild population collapsed.

The remarkable developments of the past decade have given the conservation program its most significant reasons for optimism, with the discovery that some wild devils are developing a degree of resistance to the tumour disease and that the disease itself is in some areas becoming less lethal. The evolutionary responses that the devil population is showing to the selective pressure that a lethal disease imposes, while not eliminating the disease or its threat, provide the mechanism by which the wild population may be able to persist and potentially recover without human intervention sustaining it indefinitely.

The reintroduction of Tasmanian devils to Barrington Tops in NSW, the first wild population of the species on the Australian mainland in approximately 3,000 years, represents the most significant wildlife reintroduction in Australian history and a measure of the conservation program's confidence in the insurance population's viability. The mainland reintroduction provides both the conservation benefit of a second wild population and the ecological function that a large predator provides in the ecosystem, including the suppression of introduced foxes and cats that the mainland predators historically kept in check.

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