Menna Jones peered into a trap, and a Tasmanian devil peered back at her. Its gaze was somehow off. The devil’s face seemed misshapen, and its jaw was raw and red. Perhaps, she thought, the swelling was an infected wound. Many devils are torn up by the end of the breeding season, after a month of winning and defending mates.
Jones, a biologist at the University of Tasmania, was trying to decipher the social structure of the island’s iconic creature, the largest meat-eating marsupial in existence. Were the devils promiscuous, as many researchers suspected? Which ones were studly and prolific, and which ones were losing the reproductive race? This fellow was one of many helping Jones answer those questions in June 2001 at her study site on the Freycinet Peninsula, a crooked finger of land in eastern Tasmania.
Jones reached for a canvas sack, tipped the cage gently and shook ...
