Risking it all in a last-ditch search for Australias lost tiger

[Judi Lynn]

3 May 2017

Two tantalising sightings of possible Tasmanian tigers have inspired a renowned conservationist to find out if thylacines really are extinct



By Graham Lawton

“THIS thing has taken on a life of its own,” Bill Laurance tells me over a glitchy Skype connection from a fieldwork site in Borneo. I’m not surprised, but I don’t say anything. What do you expect when you’re one of the world’s most respected conservation biologists, and you suddenly announce that you’re going in search of thylacines?

Laurance is not averse to publicity, but he is not one for stunts. A professor at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, his day job is to document the wanton destruction of the natural world by hunting, logging, climate change and the rest. “I’m repeatedly accused of being a depressing speaker because of the topics I talk about – habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and all that stuff,” he says. But sometimes something falls into your lap that you just can’t resist. For Laurance, an American living in Australia, it turns out to be the Tasmanian tiger.

Once the world’s largest marsupial predator, thylacines have long exerted a strong tug on the imagination – and the conscience. They lived all over Australia until about 4000 years ago, when they were wiped off the mainland, probably as a result of competition from newly arrived dingoes. They persisted on Tasmania, but the last known animal died in a zoo in Hobart in 1936, just 59 days after the Tasmanian government passed legal protection to halt an extinction for which it was largely responsible. For the previous 100 years, European settlers had subjected thylacines to remorseless persecution. With a government bounty on offer, sheep farmers shot, trapped and poisoned the animals in their thousands. The last wild thylacine was shot dead in 1930.

But sightings continued across Australia. Almost all have been dismissed as hoaxes or cases of mistaken identity: foxes, dingoes, feral pigs or even the rear ends of wallabies. But a few are less easy to discount.

More:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431240-500-its-eyes-shone-red-could-the-tasmanian-tiger-be-alive/?utm_campaign=webpush&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=ILC&campaign_id=ILC%7CNSNS%7C2016-GLOBAL-webpush-feed

[shenmue]

1. Fingers crossed

[cstanleytech]

2. I would be careful crossing them to much though as the odds arent good for finding any of them

still alive let alone enough of them to be viable as a breeding species.