Uncertain Hope Blooms for Tasmanian Devils

Using remote camera traps, photographer Heath Holden captured rare images like this one of wild Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) in their natural habitat. The animals' bright red ears and eerie, raucous scuffles earned the scrappy marsupials their haunting common name. (Credit: Heath Holden) On a misty summer morning in 2015, Manuel Ruiz ditched his pickup truck along a dusty two-track road in northwest Tasmania and trod into a grove of eucalyptus. He was searching for a devil. “If I were a devil, this would be a nice place to spend the night,” thought Ruiz, a wildlife veterinarian and doctoral candidate at the University of Tasmania. The Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) is the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial. Despite that distinction, the animal is only about the size of a raccoon. But what the species lacks in heft, it makes up for with tenacity. At night, devils hunt and scavenge wallabies, possums, and other small mammals under the cover of their black fur. During the day, they retreat to underground dens and sleep off the rigors of their nighttime exploits. As picturesque and wild as northwest Tasmania’s landscape may be, it is also a battleground for disease, and in 2015, Ruiz was patrolling the epidemic front lines. It didn’t take him long to find evidence of the fight. A few dozen paces into the undergrowth, he knelt to inspect a white cylindrical trap nestled amidst a lush cluster of ferns. Inside, a female devil peered down her pointed, whiskered snout at Ruiz. He had seen this individual, nicknamed Leesa, once before. A raw, oozing tumor as large as a ping-pong ball gaped behind the right corner of her mouth—the mark of a debilitating cancer. Leesa and thousands of other devils suffer from what’s known as devil facial tumor disease. The cancer was first detected in 1996 in eastern Tasmania. Since then, it has spread rapidly across the island state, causing an overall species decline of 80 percent, with localized declines of more than 90 percent. A decade ago, scientists predicted imminent extinction for the critically endangered species. Since then, some wild devils have begun to show signs of resistance, offering new hope for the species’ survival. And while the quickly spreading cancer has wrought great devastation, it has also offered scientists a rare window into the progression of cancer at large. Researchers are monitoring the disease as it runs its course, searching for clues that will help them derail it. They’re hopeful that their findings might soon be applied to combatting cancers in other species—maybe even in humans someday.