| Desperately hoping to catch a Tasmanian tiger by the tail |
Like so many of the wonderfully strange beasts in Australia, the Tasmanian tiger looked like it was cobbled together from spare parts. Its rear half resembled a tiger -- well, sort of -- with black stripes and a long tail. Its front half could be mistaken for a wolf. And it had a pouch, like a kangaroo. Or should I say "has"? Nobody is 100 percent sure whether this odd creature is still roaming the wild and remote pockets of Tasmania. The last one in captivity died in the Hobart zoo in 1936, and the tiger is officially extinct. But ranchers, hunter and hikers keep claiming to catch glimpses of them creeping wraithlike through the tall grass, and not all the sightings can be easily explained by an overindulgence in Tooheys. Wildlife biologists concede it's possible -- highly unlikely, but possible -- that a few might have managed to survive in the wild. It's fair to say most Tasmanians want their tiger back. Its image decorates the label of the island's most popular beer, sports uniforms and license plates, and one can be forgiven for thinking they're trying to resurrect the creature through wishful thinking. Some are endeavoring to do more than that: A team at the Australian Museum is even attempting to revive the species through cloning. Part of what's at work here, it seems to me, is the yearning for some mystery in the world, the need to believe there are still amazing discoveries waiting to be made. In the last few decades, as global media have saturated the world and we've gained the ability to see live pictures from even the most distant and exotic locales -- even the moons of Saturn -- we've paradoxically lost some of our capacity for wonder. That's why, I think, some of us cling so tenaciously to the hope that some sort of prehistoric monster could be lurking in the murky depths of Loch Ness and that Bigfoot might really be padding around the forests of the Siskiyou Mountains. For years I've been obsessed with the yeti -- the abominable snowman -- the half-mythological, ape-like creature that occasionally leaves mysterious lines of footprints across Himalayan snowfields. It's not hard to find a Sherpa who claims to have seen or heard a yeti; in fact, it's sometimes hard to find one who hasn't. The Tasmanian tiger, of course, is in another category altogether. It most definitely existed until 68 years ago, and on the Internet you can see an old film of the last known one padding around its cage in the Hobart zoo. (www. tased.edu.au/tot/fauna/ tiger.mov). Considering that biologists in Australia occasionally stumble upon insects, ferns and even large trees thought to have vanished from the earth over 100 million years ago, it hardly beggars the imagination to suppose that a dog-sized marsupial might have escaped detection for seven decades. The tiger -- its scientific name is thylacine, short for Thylacinus cynocephalus, which means, roughly, "pouched dog" -- was quite common in Tasmania when Europeans first arrived, mainly because its predator, the dingo, never made it across the Bass Strait from the Australian mainland. But English settlers feared the thylacine as a threat to the sheep they brought with them, and bounty hunters killed them mercilessly. Ironically, the Tasmanian government officially protected the creature just two months before the death of the last one known to be alive. For the last six years, a team of biotechnicians at the Australian Museum in Sydney has been working to clone a thylacine from a baby snatched from its mother's pouch in 1866 and pickled in a jar of alcohol. It's a scenario straight out of "Jurassic Park." They've made some progress - they say they've harvested a pretty good crop of DNA to work with - but detractors question, first, whether they have the science to pull it off, and, second, whether it's worth the effort. "What are they going to do?" said Nick Mooney, a wildlife biologist with the state of Tasmania. "Spend $80 million cloning a thylacine and then turn it loose in the wild?" For two decades it's been part of Mooney's job to hunt for the Tasmanian tiger. He's laid out wet sand in likely habitats to try to capture footprints, set photographic trip-lines, questioned ranchers and hunters, and examined more scat than he cares to think about. And he frequently crosses paths with amateur thylacine hunters who've devoted their life to the cause. "People bankrupt themselves and ruin relationships over this," he told me. "I don't know of any suicides, but I know of a number of people who've flipped. It's an obsession for some people." Mooney said he's seen "a lot of so-called evidence, but nothing convincing. It's always possible the thylacine's still out there, but I'd say it's highly unlikely." He's regularly accused of lying by these people; they believe he knows where thylacines are but is keeping the information to himself. When I pressed him on the point, he said this: "If they've managed to survive all these years without being found through some trick of nature, I think the best thing we could do is just leave them alone." Mooney reiterated that he's almost certain the Tasmanian tiger is long extinct. But I also got the sense that if he knew otherwise, he probably wouldn't tell me. |
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Desperately hoping to catch a Tasmanian tiger by the tail
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- Written by: AYR ADMIN
- Category: Thylacine