
The Obsessive Search for the Tasmanian Tiger - whocansay
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/02/the-obsessive-search-for-the-tasmanian-tiger
======
samplatt
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.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
> Considering we're only 8 generations away from huddling in a village,
> frightened of the wolves and anything that goes bump in the night.

I think you severely underestimate our predecessors. They were not feral
beasts, they were almost exactly the same animals as you and I, minus some
education and technology.

8 generations ago (25? 30 years each?), the Age of Exploration in which
western European powers sent huge sailing ships, (more than a hundred feet
long with dozens or hundreds of cannons) around the world to map and claim
unknown lands was drawing to a close, because they were running out of unknown
lands. London was a city of more than half a million people, importing goods
from the furthest corners of the empire, with huge textile mills and blast
furnaces and other factories ramping up,the industrial revolution. They
weren't huddling in the mud and dark, they were sitting around candles and oil
lamps, near streets lit with oil from whales they killed.

Even 80 generations or more ago the Romans, Greeks, Babylonians and Egyptians
were dealing with problems of empire governance not wolf packs. (To say
nothing of the Chinese, Japanese, or Mayan civilizations which I know less
about.)

They may have been superstitious, but they were definitely _homo sapiens_.

~~~
drb91
Well I'm still terrified of wolves, so I don't get your point. Did you misread
the parent comment? Fear isn't dictated by technology. We still fear things
that can't really hurt us easily.

------
olliej
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
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
Uh, but the Tasmanian Devil is still alive. The Tiger was "effectively" and
literally wiped out by European immigrants.

~~~
danieltillett
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
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
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.

------
hyperpallium
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
Great movie!

------
simonvc
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
There are a few dead ones in museums. As long as the DNA remains there is hope
we could bring them back.

~~~
pvaldes
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
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.

------
Tade0
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)

------
XalvinX
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...

------
cwmma
Wikipedia has all the (undisputed) footage of a Thylacine [1].

1\.
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AThyla...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AThylacine_footage_compilation.ogv)

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

------
altitudinous
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-...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-28/healthy-population-of-devils-
discovered-in-remote-south-west-tas/9706864)

~~~
pvaldes
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.

------
jpatokal
> _Could a global icon of extinction still be alive?_

Betteridge's Law applies: no.

