Sympathy for the Devil

Abstract

I remember the first time I saw a Tasmanian devil. It musthave been about twenty years ago. I had flown overnightfrom Tahiti to Sydney, the old slow route across the Pacific,to attend the International Parasitological Congress inBrisbane. We had an eight-hour layover and decided tovisit the Taronga Zoo, a fantastic first glimpse of many ofAustralian’s endemic marsupial mammals. The devil was ina small exhibit surrounded by a circular moat. You couldstand within twelve feet of him as he stood on a tree trunk,pugnacious, totally self confident, and formidable. He hadthe demeanor of a cross between James Cagney and ErrolFlynn, his fellow Tasmanian, who had grown up on a farmin Tasmania where his father kept caged devils and ulti-mately became the foundation professor of zoology at theUniversity of Tasmania. The son migrated to Hollywoodand global fame as one of Warner Brother’s first moviestars (Owen and Pemberton, 2005). The sharp piercing eyesof the zoo devil seemed to see us all as a potential meal, andhis formidable forelimbs suggested he would not take longto eviscerate us and enjoy the spoils. This was the image theearly settlers of Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania) had of thedevil, a ferocious and insatiable carnivore that presented aformidable challenge to their sheep flocks. Subsequent re-search showed this image to be false; devils are morescavengers than hunters and they do a formidable jobremoving dead, rotting, and potentially diseased carcassesfrom the landscape. The nocturnal attacks on sheep flocksthat the farmers blamed on devils were more likely causedby the feral dog population their predecessors had acci-dentally introduced to island.Devils appeared again with surreal prescience when Imade a subsequent trip to Australia to attend the annualWildlife Disease Association meeting in Cairns in 2005.There was now a direct flight from Los Angeles to Sydney,fourteen hours of Syrah, Cabernet, movies about dogs thatplay basketball, and half-read books and magazines aboutan ill-conceived war. I emerged from a half-sleep to findmyself watching an Australian TV documentary aboutTasmanian devils starring Menna Jones, an Australianbiologist who spent months in the wilds of Tasmaniadocumenting the behavioral ecology of free-living devils.The documentary ended with the chilling revelation thatdevils seemed to be suffering from a new disease in thewild, a strange syndrome of horrendous facial tumors thatprogressed to cause the eventual death of the devil.When I made it to the meeting in Cairns there was awhole session and several break-out groups discussing theDevil Facial Tumor Disease (DFTD). We all wrestled withthis as a new concept, a totally novel and very bizarre typeof pathogen whose emergence seemed totally unpredict-able. ‘‘Hmmm, sounds a bit like ‘canine transmissiblevenereal tumour’ to me’’ suggested Frances Gulland overbeers one night. Frances is always several steps ahead of therest of us and this insight proved closer to the truth thanmost of the other wild guesses kicked around the bar thatevening. Several of us were deeply concerned about thelikely impact on the devils and what should be done to slowthe spread of the disease. The papers gathered in this special