Article — From the April 2008 issue
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Article — From the April 2008 issue
During the early months of 1996, not long before Easter, an amateur wildlife photographer named Christo Baars made his way to the Australian island-state of Tasmania, where he set up camp in an old airport shack within the boundaries of Mount William National Park. Baars’s purpose, as on previous visits, was to photograph Tasmanian devils, piglet-size marsupials unique to the island’s temperate forests and moors. Because devils are nocturnal, Baars equipped his blind with a cot, a couple of car batteries, and several strong spotlights. For bait he used road-kill kangaroos. Then he settled in to wait.
The devil, known to science as Sarcophilus harrisii, lives mostly by scavenging and sometimes by predation. It will eat, in addition to kangaroo meat, chickens, fish, frogs, kelp maggots, lambs, rats, snakes, wallabies, and the occasional rubber boot. It can consume nearly half its own body weight in under an hour, and yet—with its black fur and its trundling gait—it looks like an underfed bear cub. Fossil evidence shows that devils inhabited all of Australia until about 500 years ago, when competition with dingoes and other factors caused them to die out everywhere but in Tasmania, which dingoes had yet to colonize. More recently, Tasmanian stockmen and farmers have persecuted devils with the same ferocity directed elsewhere at wolves and coyotes. The devils’ reproductive rate, opportunistic habits, and tolerance for human proximity, however, have allowed localized populations to persist or recover, and at the time of Baars’s 1996 visit, their total number was probably around 150,000.
On his earlier visits, Baars had seen at least ten devils every night, and they were quick to adjust to his presence. They would walk into his blind, into his tent, into his kitchen, and he could recognize returning individuals by the distinctively shaped white patches on their chests. This trip was different. On the first night, his bait failed to attract a single devil, and the second night was only a little better. He thought at first that maybe the stockmen and farmers had finally succeeded in wiping them out. Then he spotted a devil with a weird facial lump. It was an ugly mass, rounded and bulging, like a huge boil, or a tumor. Baars took photographs. More devils wandered in, at least one of them with a similar growth, and Baars took more pictures. This was no longer wildlife photography of the picturesque sort; it was, or anyway soon would become, forensic documentation.
Back in Hobart, Tasmania’s capital, Baars showed his pictures to Nick Mooney, a veteran officer of Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service who has dealt with the devil and its enemiesfor decades. Mooney had never seen anything like this. The lumps looked tumorous, yes—but what sort of tumor? Mooney consulted a pathologist, who suggested that the devils might be afflicted with lymphosarcoma, a kind of lymphatic cancer, maybe caused by a virus passed to the devils from feral cats. Such a virus might also be passed from devil to devil, triggering cancer in each.
More evidence of contagion began to accumulate. Three years after Baars shot his photographs, a biologist named Menna Jones took note of a single tumor-bearing animal, something she had not seen before. Then, in 2001, at her study site along Tasmania’s eastern coast, her traps yielded three more devils with ulcerated tumors. That really got her attention. She euthanized the animals and brought them to a lab, where they became the first victims to be autopsied by a veterinary pathologist. The “tumors” (until then the term had been only a guess or a metaphor) did seem to be cancerous malignancies, but not of the sort expected from a lymphosarcoma-triggering virus. This peculiarity raised more questions than it answered. Tasmanian devils in captivity were known to be quite susceptible to cancer, at least in some circumstances, possibly involving exposure to carcinogens. But the idea that the cancer itself was contagious seemed beyond the realm of possibility. And yet, during the following year, Menna Jones charted the spread of the problem across northern Tasmania. Nick Mooney, meanwhile, had done some further trapping himself. At a site in the northern midlands, he captured twenty-three devils, seven of which had horrible tumors. Shocked and puzzled, he remembered the Baars photos from years earlier.
Further trapping (more than a hundred animals, of which 15 percent were infected) showed Mooney what Jones had also seen: that the tumors were consistently localized on faces, filling eye sockets, distending cheeks, making it difficult for the animals to see or to eat. Why faces? Maybe because devils suffer many facial and mouth injuries—from chewing on brittle bones, from fighting with one another over food and breeding rights, from the rough interactions between male and female when they mate. The bigger tumors were crumbly, like feta cheese. Could it be that tumor cells, broken off one animal, fell into the wounds of another, took hold there, and grew? This prospect seemed outlandish, but the evidence was leading inexorably to a strange and frightening new hypothesis: the cancer itself had somehow become contagious.
David Quammen ‘s previous article for Harper’s Magazine, “Darwin’s Conundrum,” appeared in the December 2006 issue.
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