7 ms·

The Obsessive Search for the Tasmanian Tiger

62 points by whocansay 8y ago

olliej 8y ago
At some point people need to accept that we killed all of them. Much like almost happened to the Tasmanian devil (part of the reason for the virulence of the their transmissible cancer is the lack of genetic diversity, caused by farmers trying to exterminate them as well)
- danieltillett 8y ago
  They were effectively killed by the introduction of the dingo a few thousand years ago. Tasmania is too small to support an apex preditor like the Tasmanian tiger long term and maintain the needed genetic diversity. This is the same problem faced by the Tasmanian devil and it is why the transmissible cancer has spread.
  - RVuRnvbM2e 8y ago
    Uh, but the Tasmanian Devil is still alive. The Tiger was "effectively" and literally wiped out by European immigrants.
    - danieltillett 8y ago
      Umm I think you missed the point of my post. The Tasmanian tiger was found all over Australia until a few thousand years ago. It was the introduction of the Dingo that caused its extinction (this was not by European immigrants by the way). Only the population in Tasmania survived thanks to the rising sea level cutting off Tasmania from the Australian mainland. The population in Tasmania was too small to support the genetic diversity required for a sustainable population - the extinction was just a matter of time due to inbreeding. On this topic while there was some hunting, the cause of the collapse of the Tasmanian tiger population is unknown and there is some thought that it might have been due to disease not hunting. Yes the Tasmanian devil is still alive, but it has almost no genetic diversity. This is why the facial cancer is able to spread from animal to animal. Edit. I should add the Tasmanian devils were also found on the mainland until the dingos wiped them out too.
      - XalvinX 8y ago
        Your "extinct from inbreeding" theory is not likely. There are many examples of animals coming back from groups well under 100, and doing fine. Such as the sea otter of California which was down to somewhere between 25 and 50 and is now over 3000, with no signs of deformities or other problems.
        danieltillett 8y ago
        Sustained inbreed on a small island is a very common way for apex predators to become extinct and there are lots of examples from around the world of this happening after the last ice age. 100 might be OK for a short drop (~150 is considered the bottom end for most populations), but sustain a population at 50 breeding pairs for a few hundred generations and every allele in the population will end up homozygous though genetic drift.
  - olliej 8y ago
    What? Tasmanian devil population was robust until 1840 when a bounty was introduced because of a mistaken belief that they hunted livestock. The hunting for bounty and outright culling almost made them Extinct. They only became protected after the last thylacine died. Subsequent attempts to unprotect and poison them were by idiot farmer who kept deciding they killed livestock. Anyway, the result of the near extinction caused by humans drastically reduced genetic diversity, which meant even though their numbers did increase they were highly susceptible to any disease, in this case it’s a transmissible disease. Since the 90s their population has dropped by 80%. As far as thylacine goes - you claim it was introduction of dingoes thousands of years ago, and the there is evidence the aborigines has been present in Australia for at least 10000 years. Yet it wasn’t a hundred years of hunting by Europeans that it went extinct. The causation seems much more to be on the head of humans (specifically Europeans, who have a huge documented history of exterminating animals in land that they migrate to - not to say only Europeans cause extinctions, just that the nature of our society means we have much more documentation of European history than of locations that weren’t well, in Europe)
    - danieltillett 8y ago
      You have managed to get Tasmanian tigers and Tasmanian devils confused. Tasmanian devils are very much not extinct. The Dingo was a rather late arrival in Australia - around 4000 years ago [1]. This was after Tasmania was separated from the mainland by rising sea water after the end of the last ice age which is why they never reached Tasmania. It is not my claim that Dingos were responsible for the extinction of the Thylacines on the mainland [2] - I just happen to be far more informed about this topic than some posting here. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine#Extinction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine#Extinction
jpatokal 8y ago
> Could a global icon of extinction still be alive? Betteridge's Law applies: no.
samplatt 8y ago
As a native to south-western australia, this all reads pretty accurate. The animal certainly is alive and strong in hearts and minds, if not real life. There's all the usual local country-town big-creature legends, and a bit of 50-year-old evidence helps as well. The idea of 'monsters' of all kinds have always fascinated me. As the article mentions, it's only in the extremely recent past (last couple of hundred years) that extinction was recognised as even something that was possible. We normally think of extinct megafauna as something that existed in prehistoric times - literally, before we invented writing, but the word here is often by the layman used to mean "before we invented conscious thought". Many Aboriginal Dreamtime stories (so, within the last 80k years) are thought to involve now-extinct megafauna, other large creatures are known to have gone extinct only in the last 2-3000 years, untold small species have disappeared in the last ~200 years... it's hardly surprising that humans are such a superstitious bunch, considering we're only ~8 generations away from huddling in a village, frightened of the wolves and anything else that goes bump in the night. >Tasmania, which is sometimes said to hang beneath Australia like a green jewel ...we don't say that. I don't think even Tasmanians say that. They're too busy trying to convince everyone not avoid the place so they can enjoy it.
- jacobush 8y ago
  Dreamtime stories are awesome. Some apparently (was on HN a while back) describe maps of areas which are now under sea. That reliably dates the stories millennia back in time. Unchanged. Talk about error resistant coding.
  - danieltillett 8y ago
    I am not too sure about this. Every "dreamtime" story I have investigated has turned out to be so vague it could be anything or was "discovered" in very recent times. More fundamentally there is no reason to think that Australian Aboriginal oral history is anymore reliable than it is anywhere else in the world (i.e. not at all after a few generations).
    - jacobush 8y ago
simonvc 8y ago
There are no Thylacines left. If there were, one would have been road killed by now. Source. Australian. Have had near misses with every kind of non-extinct Australian wildlife while riding motorbikes around tassie.
- danieltillett 8y ago
  There are a few dead ones in museums. As long as the DNA remains there is hope we could bring them back.
  - pvaldes 8y ago
    This way of thinking, "but we could always bring them back" can be also a problem. I would call it the belief in Magic science. We don't know the economics of recreating an extinct species, but would be most probably not only technically challenging, but also very expensive. Even if we technically could bring back the rainforests to small areas of the sahara, the probability of seeing it done is zero. Is possible, but the huge resources needed are limited and would not allow it. Saving the vaquita or the totoba, or the frogs, can be challenging but is easier and much cheaper than trying to bring back the same animals from the extinction tomorrow.
    - danieltillett 8y ago
      I agree, but I was just trying to make the point that the Tasmanian tiger is only 99.99999% extinct. The genetic information we have is vastly better than having nothing all. I personally would love to see a living Tasmanian tiger and while I don't think I ever will, maybe my grandchildren will.
- dwd 8y ago
  I recently visited the East coast and was shocked at the amount of roadkill. You see more dead wildlife in a day than you're likely to see alive in any zoo.
- XalvinX 8y ago
  There are something like 50,000 mountain lions in California alone (and many more throughout North America) yet they never end up as roadkill..unheard of. Some animals are smarter than others.
altitudinous 8y ago
They recently found a new disease free group of Tasmanian Devils down in a remote spot in Tassie. I didn't read the article, so maybe that is in there. If a group of uninfected Tassie Devils can be hiding away, then so can the Tigers. EDIT source : http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-28/healthy-population-of-devils-discovered-in-remote-south-west-tas/9706864 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-28/healthy-population-of-...
- pvaldes 8y ago
  This is a recolonization probably, Tasman devils do it all the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metapopulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metapopulation When the last tasman devil in an area dies, the area is totally cleaned from Tasman devil canker also. A very remote area can be reached only by healthy animals. The only able to endure the travel of several weeks or months. The area will remain clean for a while. Eventually the boom of animals born in the area with higher survival chances will extend and recolonize the wide empty space between the populations with and without canker. With a lot of luck all the diseased populations could collapse in this time, and the species could be free of the cancer eventually. With bad luck, an ill animal could get trapped in a truck, travel and be released in the clean area. Being isolated, the remote population would quickly vanish. The difference with tylacine is that tasman devils have several uncorrupted backups in zoos and also in the wild.
hyperpallium 8y ago
There's a nice little film with Willem Dafoe about this, called The Hunter, showcasing the beautiful Tasmanian wilderness. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunter_(2011_Australian_film) https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunter_(2011_Australian_film)
- cetalingua 8y ago
  Great movie!
Tade0 8y ago
I think the chance of finding(much less capturing) a live specimen is even smaller than the chance of successfully cloning one, especially given that its genome has been recently sequenced[0]. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0417-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0417-y
cwmma 8y ago
Wikipedia has all the (undisputed) footage of a Thylacine [1]. 1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AThylacine_footage_compilation.ogv https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AThyla...
- simonrobb 8y ago
  Should be noted this is footage of the last known Thylacine, in a Tasmanian zoo.
XalvinX 8y ago
I strongly suspect that all the armchair naysayers about this and things like sasquatch, yeti, and so forth, have not spent much time in the great outdoors. I have. There are many wild places in the world and most creatures in it are fairly shy and good at staying undetected, as well as very sensitive and can smell, see, or otherwise detect clumsy, smelly, loud humans from very far off. There could easily be small populations of an animal like this in a place the size of Tazmania, never mind a whole continent the size of Australia...both of which are sparsely populated besides. Besides that, why would people lie about all the encounters, that are random and coming from many sources, clearly it isn't a conspiracy or something. I will never understand how people can just smugly write off so many things as impossible, fantasy, myth, superstition, etc. when the world is so big and not that explored, the seas are basically unexplored, and space...well that's really enormous. A lot of things could be out there, and it is very, very hard to prove with certainty that something doesn't exist, or that the largest of some creature has been caught, or whatever. Scientists love to make proclamations, but they frequently are proven wrong... You know what I'd really like to see some scientists get around to studying seriously? Crop circles. Still completely unexplained...

62 points by whocansay 8y ago

At some point people need to accept that we killed all of them. Much like almost happened to the Tasmanian devil (part of the reason for the virulence of the their transmissible cancer is the lack of genetic diversity, caused by farmers trying to exterminate them as well)

danieltillett 8y ago
They were effectively killed by the introduction of the dingo a few thousand years ago. Tasmania is too small to support an apex preditor like the Tasmanian tiger long term and maintain the needed genetic diversity. This is the same problem faced by the Tasmanian devil and it is why the transmissible cancer has spread.
- RVuRnvbM2e 8y ago
  Uh, but the Tasmanian Devil is still alive. The Tiger was "effectively" and literally wiped out by European immigrants.
  - danieltillett 8y ago
    Umm I think you missed the point of my post. The Tasmanian tiger was found all over Australia until a few thousand years ago. It was the introduction of the Dingo that caused its extinction (this was not by European immigrants by the way). Only the population in Tasmania survived thanks to the rising sea level cutting off Tasmania from the Australian mainland. The population in Tasmania was too small to support the genetic diversity required for a sustainable population - the extinction was just a matter of time due to inbreeding. On this topic while there was some hunting, the cause of the collapse of the Tasmanian tiger population is unknown and there is some thought that it might have been due to disease not hunting. Yes the Tasmanian devil is still alive, but it has almost no genetic diversity. This is why the facial cancer is able to spread from animal to animal. Edit. I should add the Tasmanian devils were also found on the mainland until the dingos wiped them out too.
    - XalvinX 8y ago
      Your "extinct from inbreeding" theory is not likely. There are many examples of animals coming back from groups well under 100, and doing fine. Such as the sea otter of California which was down to somewhere between 25 and 50 and is now over 3000, with no signs of deformities or other problems.
      - danieltillett 8y ago
        Sustained inbreed on a small island is a very common way for apex predators to become extinct and there are lots of examples from around the world of this happening after the last ice age. 100 might be OK for a short drop (~150 is considered the bottom end for most populations), but sustain a population at 50 breeding pairs for a few hundred generations and every allele in the population will end up homozygous though genetic drift.
- olliej 8y ago
  What? Tasmanian devil population was robust until 1840 when a bounty was introduced because of a mistaken belief that they hunted livestock. The hunting for bounty and outright culling almost made them Extinct. They only became protected after the last thylacine died. Subsequent attempts to unprotect and poison them were by idiot farmer who kept deciding they killed livestock. Anyway, the result of the near extinction caused by humans drastically reduced genetic diversity, which meant even though their numbers did increase they were highly susceptible to any disease, in this case it’s a transmissible disease. Since the 90s their population has dropped by 80%. As far as thylacine goes - you claim it was introduction of dingoes thousands of years ago, and the there is evidence the aborigines has been present in Australia for at least 10000 years. Yet it wasn’t a hundred years of hunting by Europeans that it went extinct. The causation seems much more to be on the head of humans (specifically Europeans, who have a huge documented history of exterminating animals in land that they migrate to - not to say only Europeans cause extinctions, just that the nature of our society means we have much more documentation of European history than of locations that weren’t well, in Europe)
  - danieltillett 8y ago
    You have managed to get Tasmanian tigers and Tasmanian devils confused. Tasmanian devils are very much not extinct. The Dingo was a rather late arrival in Australia - around 4000 years ago [1]. This was after Tasmania was separated from the mainland by rising sea water after the end of the last ice age which is why they never reached Tasmania. It is not my claim that Dingos were responsible for the extinction of the Thylacines on the mainland [2] - I just happen to be far more informed about this topic than some posting here. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine#Extinction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine#Extinction

jpatokal 8y ago

> Could a global icon of extinction still be alive? Betteridge's Law applies: no.

samplatt 8y ago

As a native to south-western australia, this all reads pretty accurate. The animal certainly is alive and strong in hearts and minds, if not real life. There's all the usual local country-town big-creature legends, and a bit of 50-year-old evidence helps as well. The idea of 'monsters' of all kinds have always fascinated me. As the article mentions, it's only in the extremely recent past (last couple of hundred years) that extinction was recognised as even something that was possible. We normally think of extinct megafauna as something that existed in prehistoric times - literally, before we invented writing, but the word here is often by the layman used to mean "before we invented conscious thought". Many Aboriginal Dreamtime stories (so, within the last 80k years) are thought to involve now-extinct megafauna, other large creatures are known to have gone extinct only in the last 2-3000 years, untold small species have disappeared in the last ~200 years... it's hardly surprising that humans are such a superstitious bunch, considering we're only ~8 generations away from huddling in a village, frightened of the wolves and anything else that goes bump in the night. >Tasmania, which is sometimes said to hang beneath Australia like a green jewel ...we don't say that. I don't think even Tasmanians say that. They're too busy trying to convince everyone not avoid the place so they can enjoy it.

jacobush 8y ago
Dreamtime stories are awesome. Some apparently (was on HN a while back) describe maps of areas which are now under sea. That reliably dates the stories millennia back in time. Unchanged. Talk about error resistant coding.
- danieltillett 8y ago
  I am not too sure about this. Every "dreamtime" story I have investigated has turned out to be so vague it could be anything or was "discovered" in very recent times. More fundamentally there is no reason to think that Australian Aboriginal oral history is anymore reliable than it is anywhere else in the world (i.e. not at all after a few generations).
  - jacobush 8y ago

simonvc 8y ago

There are no Thylacines left. If there were, one would have been road killed by now. Source. Australian. Have had near misses with every kind of non-extinct Australian wildlife while riding motorbikes around tassie.

danieltillett 8y ago
There are a few dead ones in museums. As long as the DNA remains there is hope we could bring them back.
- pvaldes 8y ago
  This way of thinking, "but we could always bring them back" can be also a problem. I would call it the belief in Magic science. We don't know the economics of recreating an extinct species, but would be most probably not only technically challenging, but also very expensive. Even if we technically could bring back the rainforests to small areas of the sahara, the probability of seeing it done is zero. Is possible, but the huge resources needed are limited and would not allow it. Saving the vaquita or the totoba, or the frogs, can be challenging but is easier and much cheaper than trying to bring back the same animals from the extinction tomorrow.
  - danieltillett 8y ago
    I agree, but I was just trying to make the point that the Tasmanian tiger is only 99.99999% extinct. The genetic information we have is vastly better than having nothing all. I personally would love to see a living Tasmanian tiger and while I don't think I ever will, maybe my grandchildren will.
dwd 8y ago
I recently visited the East coast and was shocked at the amount of roadkill. You see more dead wildlife in a day than you're likely to see alive in any zoo.
XalvinX 8y ago
There are something like 50,000 mountain lions in California alone (and many more throughout North America) yet they never end up as roadkill..unheard of. Some animals are smarter than others.

altitudinous 8y ago

They recently found a new disease free group of Tasmanian Devils down in a remote spot in Tassie. I didn't read the article, so maybe that is in there. If a group of uninfected Tassie Devils can be hiding away, then so can the Tigers. EDIT source : http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-28/healthy-population-of-devils-discovered-in-remote-south-west-tas/9706864 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-28/healthy-population-of-...

pvaldes 8y ago
This is a recolonization probably, Tasman devils do it all the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metapopulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metapopulation When the last tasman devil in an area dies, the area is totally cleaned from Tasman devil canker also. A very remote area can be reached only by healthy animals. The only able to endure the travel of several weeks or months. The area will remain clean for a while. Eventually the boom of animals born in the area with higher survival chances will extend and recolonize the wide empty space between the populations with and without canker. With a lot of luck all the diseased populations could collapse in this time, and the species could be free of the cancer eventually. With bad luck, an ill animal could get trapped in a truck, travel and be released in the clean area. Being isolated, the remote population would quickly vanish. The difference with tylacine is that tasman devils have several uncorrupted backups in zoos and also in the wild.

hyperpallium 8y ago

There's a nice little film with Willem Dafoe about this, called The Hunter, showcasing the beautiful Tasmanian wilderness. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunter_(2011_Australian_film) https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunter_(2011_Australian_film)

cetalingua 8y ago
Great movie!

Tade0 8y ago

I think the chance of finding(much less capturing) a live specimen is even smaller than the chance of successfully cloning one, especially given that its genome has been recently sequenced[0]. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0417-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0417-y

cwmma 8y ago

Wikipedia has all the (undisputed) footage of a Thylacine [1]. 1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AThylacine_footage_compilation.ogv https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AThyla...

simonrobb 8y ago
Should be noted this is footage of the last known Thylacine, in a Tasmanian zoo.

XalvinX 8y ago

I strongly suspect that all the armchair naysayers about this and things like sasquatch, yeti, and so forth, have not spent much time in the great outdoors. I have. There are many wild places in the world and most creatures in it are fairly shy and good at staying undetected, as well as very sensitive and can smell, see, or otherwise detect clumsy, smelly, loud humans from very far off. There could easily be small populations of an animal like this in a place the size of Tazmania, never mind a whole continent the size of Australia...both of which are sparsely populated besides. Besides that, why would people lie about all the encounters, that are random and coming from many sources, clearly it isn't a conspiracy or something. I will never understand how people can just smugly write off so many things as impossible, fantasy, myth, superstition, etc. when the world is so big and not that explored, the seas are basically unexplored, and space...well that's really enormous. A lot of things could be out there, and it is very, very hard to prove with certainty that something doesn't exist, or that the largest of some creature has been caught, or whatever. Scientists love to make proclamations, but they frequently are proven wrong... You know what I'd really like to see some scientists get around to studying seriously? Crop circles. Still completely unexplained...