THE NEW YORK TIMES heads its article: In Tasmania, the Devil Now Faces Its Own Hell …

An extract:

Even by the brutish standards of Tasmanian devils, Rosie, Harry and Clyde have led a lamentable life. A year ago, when the 3 were each the size of a sesame seed, they wriggled out of their mother’s birth canal and undulated their way to her pouch. There, each locked onto a teat and grew like gangbusters.

But tragedy struck. Within months, their mother developed devil facial tumour disease – a mysterious malady that in the last 3 years has killed nearly half of all the world’s devils, marsupials that are found only in Tasmania. Shortly after she died, the baby devils, grown to the size of tiny puppies, were found dangling from their mother’s pouch, starving to death.

Rescued and reared by hand, Rosie, Harry and Clyde recently joined 6 similarly orphaned devils at the Launceston Lakes and Wildlife Park, all in strict quarantine. The fate of their exotic species — Sarcophilus harrisii — may lie in what happens to these rambunctious youngsters in the next 12 to 18 months.

“If they contract the disease, devils may be headed for extinction in the wild,” said Nick Mooney, a wildlife biologist with Tasmania’s Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment in Hobart. “If they’re free of the disease, we may have reason for hope.”

Right now, wildlife experts are struggling to comprehend the nature of the fast-moving epidemic. Moving at a rate of 6 to 10 miles a year, it is 100 percent fatal. Only the west coast, isolated by mountain ranges inhospitable to devils, is disease free. Nearly half of the estimated 150,000 devils in Tasmania are now dead.

The Times then describes the disease, concluding:

Their current best guess breaks all the rules of modern biology. Scientists suspect that the disease is caused by a cancer cell that itself moves from one animal to another when they bite one another.

The Times says the devil “bears no resemblance to Taz, the Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoon character that roars and whirls like a dervish. A real devil is the size of a spaniel, with strong forelimbs, a huge head and a disappointing back end.”

The writer interviews “ranch” owner and ecotourism operator Geoff King from Tasmania’s far north west: “They are nature’s cleanup crew,” Mr King said, before describing a little devil history:

Devils got their name from early European settlers who heard spine-chilling screams and thought that Satan was surely in the backyard. “Devils do make weird noises,” Mr. King said. “When they first arrive at a carcass,” he said, “they make a recognition signal — whorf? Are you there? Then they start hissing from the stomach. Growls turn to whines and flow into screeches. They sound like a groaning witch.”

Devil sex turns up the volume. In March and April, males engage in vicious, blood-soaked combat, said Dr. Menna Jones, a wildlife biologist who also works in the environment department. Females select “big butch dudes,” Dr. Jones said, and allow themselves to be dragged by the scruff of the neck into a burrow. There they scream and fight for several days, mating many times for hours at a time. At the end of such bouts, the male thrusts his sperm into the female every 2 minutes.

Three weeks later, the female gives birth to about 20 or 30 embryos that wiggle through a string of mucus that leads to her pouch, which has only 4 teats, Dr. Jones said. The first to arrive lock on and survive. All others perish.

Then, a life story:

By August the pouch gets crowded. When she hunts, the mother leaves her roly-poly little devils in a den. The young are weaned at 9 months, emerging from the den in the fall as goofy teenagers. Mom departs.

After 6 years of scavenging, screeching and seeking mates, devils abruptly die, Dr. Jones said. They are one of the few species in the world with so-called catastrophic mortality. How and why they die this way is not known, she said.

The Times quotes Nick Mooney as saying that Tasmanians have always taken devils for granted.

When the 1st animal with facial tumours was photographed, in 1996, he said, “people thought, eeew, that looks horrible, but it did not ring alarm bells.”

After 5 more years scientists realized the disease was widespread, Mr. Mooney said. Later surveys show a devastating picture. Spread animal-to-animal, the disease is now endemic to 2/3 of the island, which is slightly smaller than West Virginia.

The New York Times interviewed, Dr. Stephen Pyecroft is spearheading the government’s investigation into what is causing the disease in Launceston.

A virus seemed likely. But so far, Dr. Pyecroft said, every effort to identify a virus has come up empty-handed. A virus has not been ruled out, he added, but scientists are now entertaining other hypotheses.

Among these:

Since Tasmania has widespread use of agricultural chemicals and pesticides, researchers are looking at 10 toxins to see if devil disease is associated with poisons that can cause tumours.

But the leading theory is that devil facial tumour disease is caused by a transmissible tumour cell, Dr. Pyecroft said. It goes like this: About a decade ago, a random mutation occurred in a single animal in a type of cell involved in hormonal regulation. This devil developed tumours on or near its face. When another devil bit into the tumour, it was infected with tumor cells. With time, tumor cells were passed around in the bloody fray of devil social life, spreading the disease.

In this hypothesis, tumor cells alone are the infectious agent. In nature, this is not supposed to happen, Dr. Pyecroft conceded. Healthy animals exposed to pathogens, including tumor cells, will normally mount an immune response to fight off the infection.

But genetically speaking, devils are virtual clones. With scant variation in their DNA – perhaps from a population bottleneck in the recent past — they may have nearly identical immune systems. Hence they cannot fight off the tumour cells.

Every tumour cell examined so far is the same in every animal, male and female, regardless of area of origin. The chromosomal rearrangements, presumably from the one random mutation, are identical.

Dr. Pyecroft said another disease offered support for the idea that tumour cells could be infectious. That disorder, canine transmissible venereal tumour disease, is passed among dogs during sex or when they lick and sniff infected tissue. The tumours are identical, suggesting that they are passed by contact. The big difference is that the disease is not fatal in dogs. They mount an immune response and get over it.

Meanwhile, Dr. Mooney’s team is trapping devils island-wide to determine the extent of the epidemic. They are also in the process of trapping 25 young animals from apparently disease-free areas as an insurance policy. The juvenile devils are being placed in urban and offshore sites to keep them apart from older, wild devils. If after a year or so they show no signs of disease, they will be bred to ensure survival of their species.

Similarly, Rosie, Harry and Clyde are living with other orphans – Donny, Hansel, Gretel, Beatrice, Zilla and Scamp. “We usually don’t see the disease until after the animals turn 2 years old,” said Heather Hesterman, another biologist on the team. It is possible they might get the disease from their mother’s milk or contact with her saliva, Ms. Hesterman said. On the other hand, they may have resistance to it.

Veterinarians will watch the orphans for the next year or so to see what happens.

“We have so many question marks, so little time,” Ms. Hesterman said.

This article is extracted from The New York Times, May 31, 2005.