Contagious facial cancer killing off Tasmanian devils

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 10:32:05 GMT

http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=115163&sectionid=3510212

The world's largest carnivorous marsupial, the Tasmanian devil, is on the verge of extinction as a consequence of a bizarre and mysterious facial cancer that spreads like the plague.

The facial cancer that is devastating populations of Tasmanian devils in Australia stems from a nerve tumor that liberates cancer cells from the hosts where they first emerged.

The disease passes from one devil to the next by bites when the animals are fighting or mating, researchers said Thursday.

The cancer grows rapidly, choking off the animal's mouth and spreading to other organs. It has wiped out 60 percent of all Tasmanian devils since it was first observed in 1996, and some ecologists predict that it could obliterate the entire population in the wild within 35 years.

The finding provides clues to a way to diagnose devil's facial tumor disease at an early stage and represents a major step toward the development of a vaccine that could protect the remaining animals in the wild.

The spaniel-sized marsupials are native to the Australian island of Tasmania.

The animals release a foul odor under stress, and they screech and scream when they feed, a behavior that led to their name. Their powerful jaws enable them to eat entire cows, including bones and fur.

There used to be Tasmanian Tigers there , too, but they went extinct. The last one died in a zoo there.

Here is a video of the last living Tasmanian Tiger.

YouTube- Last Tasmanian Tiger, Thylacine, 1933

Tasmanian Tiger's Mysterious Die-Off Explained
Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News PrintEmailShareThisYahoo! BuzzFacebookStumbleUpon




Gone, But Not Forgotten | Discovery News Video .Jan. 12, 2009 -- Until recently, little was known about the mysterious Tasmanian tiger, but new DNA sequences of the dog-like marsupial shed light on the striped creature's surprising family tree and its extinction 73 years ago.

Researchers now believe the Tasmanian tiger, also called the thylacine, went extinct in 1936 after the death of the last known surviving individual at a Tasmanian zoo, and four decades after genetic diversity within the species dropped to a critically dangerous low.

It's thought that the thylacine's path to extinction, however, began much earlier.

"Thylacines were eliminated from mainland Australia around 3,000 years ago, perhaps because of competition from dingos, so the extinction process started that early," said Webb Miller, who led the new study, which is published online in Genome Research.