Thylacine
Thylacine
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15 May 2000 Australia:
Opinion - Tasmanian tiger - RIP
By Lesley Head
Associate Professor Lesley Head works at the University of Wollongong's school of geosciences. Her latest book is Second Nature, the History and Implications of Australia as Aboriginal Landscape. Where could a once-extinct creature survive Dubbo zoo? The Australian Museum's attempts to bring the Tasmanian tiger back from the dead will utilise impressive 21st-century scientific techniques but risk encouraging a 19th-century approach to rare and endangered species.
Even assuming the cloning is possible, where could this poor creature possibly survive but in the contemporary equivalent of a glass case? Dubbo zoo perhaps? On an isolated island? Behind a big fence? Its vastly altered predator-prey relationships would include being stalked by scientists and documentary-makers. It would be unfortunate if the thylacine project was interpreted to undermine some key principles of biodiversity conservation. Prevention is better than cure. Focus on whole ecosystems, not just the cute furry parts. The best way to protect species is to preserve their habitat in large, connected pieces.
Unfortunate and ironic, because the museum has worked hard in recent years to take the public imagination beyond the taxidermic approach to the natural sciences. Exhibitions that made drawcards of bugs, spiders and bats emphasised the importance of habitat to animals and plants. The cutting-edge genetics involved in this project no doubt provide convincing justification of its worth to the scientists involved. Many people will applaud those efforts being directed at understanding indigenous fauna rather than cows or sheep. Even if the cloning fails, the spin-offs in understanding the genetic relationships of marsupials may be considerable.
But let's hear these justifications expressed in their own terms, rather than via the dangerous implication that saving species depends on cloning. There are thousands of species (including mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, fish, plants and fungi) at ongoing risk of extinction in Australia from land clearance, urban and coastal development and degraded waterways. We could prevent these extinctions now by changing our land management practices, especially by harnessing the sums of money referred to in relation to the thylacine project.
Cash-strapped researchers and conservationists, drooling at the private funding the thylacine has apparently attracted, will mutter about publicity stunts and wonder how to invest their own projects with iconic qualities. But there are also bigger questions here about the sorts of environmental icons the Australian community creates for itself, and the way it invokes the past in contemporary management. The museum's progress report followed soon enough after Easter and Anzac Day for the twin themes of resurrection and national identity to resonate. Bringing back the thylacine was to somehow assuage our collective guilt over the environmental degradation of the past 200 years.
It is onto Tasmania that we have projected much of our interest in and anxiety about last survivors, whether Truganini, the Franklin River or the thylacine. The construction of Tasmania as remote and timeless has allowed us to deny a lot of history. In constructing Truganini as the last of her race we denied an identity to many Aboriginal Tasmanians. In constructing the Franklin River and its surrounds as a pristine wilderness we denied the history of those for whom it was hearth and home 20,000 years ago. In getting excited about thylacine DNA, let us not deny the complexity of the environmental history whose legacy we have now to work with and manage.
There is an important role here for the historical environmental sciences, one in which the less iconic extinct animals also have much to teach us. The once widespread stick-nest rats of arid Australia, for example, accumulated nests of sticks and other plant material. Their viscous urine cemented into an amber-like substance that has preserved a 10,000year archive of environmental change in the Flinders Ranges. Researcher Dr Lynne McCarthy has used this evidence to show how vegetation responded to climatic and other changes. It is a complex story of stability and change, resilience and vulnerability, and a crucial one to understanding the cycling of contemporary climatic influences, such as El Nin(ACI)o.
This and related research is fundamental for distinguishing between natural variability and human impact, and between reversible trajectories of change and thresholds which have been irrevocably crossed. For me, the extinction of the thylacine was such a threshold. We should apologise and move on.
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16apr06
TWO German tourists who say they have taken a photo of a Tasmanian tiger have returned to the state in a bid to prove the images are legitimate.
A relative of the couple previously tried to sell the photos to Melbourne's The Age newspaper for about $20,000.
The pair have supplied the pictures to the Sunday Tasmanian for nothing, but they still want to be paid $1000 if the images are published interstate.
Experts, including the Sunday Tasmanian's chief photographer Leigh Winburn, have cast doubts over the authenticity of the blurry pictures because:
- The images are blurred despite being taken by an auto-focus camera.
- There is a discrepancy with the dates on the image and that of other images on the same camera.
- The images are very reminiscent of a famous thylacine photograph taken in the 1930s.
The experts say current software packages mean such images can be made quite easily.
But Klaus Emmerichs and Birgit Jansen stand by their claim, saying they took the photos while in the Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park on February 3 last year.
The German couple confided in thylacine enthusiast Col Bailey about where they say they took the photographs.
Mr Bailey visited the site last week and said he would now begin a thorough investigation.
"I'm 50/50 on this," Mr Bailey said. "But I'm not about to discount it."
Mr Emmerichs and Ms Jansen returned to Tasmania last week and want to try to capture digital video images of a thylacine to prove their photos are legitimate.
Their photographs were at the centre of a storm of controversy last year when they were presented to The Age.
They say they flew to Tasmania from Melbourne on February 1 and caught a bus to Cradle Mountain.
They were keen to walk Tasmania's legendary Overland Track but found that they were ill-prepared for such a changeable and dramatic climate.
On a freezing and wet evening they abandoned the track and headed back to the warmth and comfort of Cradle Mountain Lodge.
The next day they had a Budget hire car brought to the lodge and late in the afternoon headed for Zeehan.
They slept in the car on the side of the road.
On the morning of February 3 they started touring the West Coast.
At about 7.30pm, after a long day driving, they decided to find somewhere to park their car and sleep.
They found a dirt road and pulled off to the side.
"We wanted to eat something and she [Birgit] must have water, we wanted to sleep there," Mr Emmerichs said.
Mr Emmerichs said he could hear running water and walked down an embankment about 20m to a creek.
There he saw an animal he said he had never seen before.
"I see him running, there was a log over the creek, he came snuffling along the ground," Mr Emmerichs said.
A similar snuffling was coming from behind the log and Mr Emmerichs said he believed it may have been another one of the creatures.
"The same noise was coming from near the fallen tree," he said. "I turned the camera on and it makes a noise when I turn it on and his head went up, I made one shot and then I take a second shot and he goes off in the bush.
"It was only about 30 seconds."
Mr Emmerichs said he went and got Birgit to look.
"It was an animal I never see before, so I got her and she came down to the water but then I thought the animal could be angry, it could be violent, if he have young," he said.
He said they then returned to the car and looked at the photographs.
"We decide not to sleep there any more," he said. "We drove to Zeehan and slept in the car."
The couple said they then spent another two weeks in Tasmania touring.
"We saw a picture on the Cascade beer of the tiger but we did not know it was so important directly, we thought it might be rare," he said.
They then flew out of the state and holidayed in Port Douglas before returning to Melbourne to fly back home to Germany.
While in Melbourne they visited Mr Emmerichs' brother, who has been living in Australia since the 1970s.
"I showed him all the photographs and he was very surprised, he said it was the Tasmanian tiger, 100 per cent, he got some books and showed us the pictures," Mr Emmerichs said.
Mr Emmerichs' brother had a friend in the media who suggested the Germans go to a lawyer.
A contract was made between the Germans and The Age to run the photographs subject to them being assessed for authenticity.
The contract is believed to have been for about $20,000.
Mr Emmerichs said he was never interested in money and in fact the couple flew out of the country leaving their brother to handle negotiations.
Mr Emmerichs returned to work in his mattress business in Kamp-Lintfort in Germany, near the Netherlands border.
"I gave my brother permission to act for us because he was here and could speak better English," he said.
Word about the pictures broke.
And in a mesmerising piece of timing, The Bulletin offered a million dollar reward for evidence thylacines still existed.
Experts consulted by The Age raised concerns about the image. The Age never ran the photographs but did run a mock-up of its own showing how software could help produce a similar image.
A number of doubts about the images have been raised.
Photographers consulted by the Sunday Tasmanian say the extent of blurring in the images is not consistent with autofocus on a modern digital camera.
Mr Emmerichs, however, said the images are blurry because he used a function called night vision which simulates a slow shutterspeed and allows pictures to be taken without flash in poor light.
The function consistently produced blurry images and so the couple stopped using it.
Another criticism of the images is that there is a discrepancy with the consecutive dates of the images.
The photograph before the first thylacine image uses the abbreviation JAN for January.
But the thylacine image uses the numeral 2 instead of FEB for February.
Mr Emmerichs said the discrepancy was caused by Birgit changing the format while on the plane to Tasmania.
The camera was still set on German time and date and she tried to reset it coming into Tasmania.
There has also been some criticism of the images that they are very reminiscent of another famous thylacine photograph taken in the 1930s.
A strange play of light has also been suggested as flash flare off a shiny surface.
But Mr Emmerichs said the fact the photographs are embedded on the hardware in his Ricoh camera proves they have not been manipulated on a computer.
He said he did not know he still had the images after leaving Melbourne last year.
The images were left with his brother on a CD taken from the camera's chip.
"But these images are still in the camera, we did not know until we got home," he said.
Mr Emmerichs said he had watched in dismay from Germany as the saga of the photographs played out.
"We came back to get proof," he said.
http://www.themercury.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,18826370%255E3462,00.html
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06 Jun 2000 Australia: Tas
Search for Tasmanian tiger not over yet.
By Catherine Chisholm
The elusive Tasmanian tiger is still alive and well, says tiger researcher Col Bailey. And champagne will be cracked if he finally proves it. Millionaire entrepreneur Ted Turner must have shared his enthusiasm when he offered a $100,000 reward for evidence of the tiger 15 years ago, an offer since withdrawn. Mr Bailey, of Maydena, on Tasmania's south coast, spends his retirement researching and searching for the tiger, a pursuit not common these days. "I know it's there, I just can't prove it," Mr Bailey told AAP. "(I do it) just to prove it to the world because so many people ridicule you." The last known Tasmanian tiger was captured in 1933 and died at the Hobart Zoo on September 7, 1936. "Many say that was the last tiger on earth," Mr Bailey said. "Of course that's a lot of rubbish because there's been at least 1,000 sightings around Tasmania." And as for cloning, well that was simply a "lot of rubbish", he said.
In April a team of scientists from the Australian Museum found enough DNA to embark on the cloning process which has put Australia at the forefront of trying to reverse extinction. DNA was extracted from a Tasmanian tiger pup which had been bottled in alcohol 134 years ago allowing scientists to undertake the $80 million project. Mr Bailey said that with the huge cost and only five per cent chance of success, it would take a long time to happen, if at all. "I'm no scientist but I think this is a pipedream, it's a long shot," he said. So, he will continue to look for signs of droppings and footprints and "absolute proof" of a creature he believes he first sighted in South Australia in the late 1960s. "I saw this dog-like animal from around 400 metres ... I thought it looked strange, the way it walked, the shape of it, it was just unusual," he said. "There were marvellous footprints everywhere." The tiger numbers dwindled when legislation was introduced to state parliament in 1888. By 1909 bounties had been paid on 2,184 tigers, because they were believed to have killed graziers' sheep.
These days Mr Bailey believes there are between 100 and 200 left in Tasmania, with sightings in Gippsland and south-east Victoria, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Tasmanian parks and wildlife officer Nick Mooney said people from around the world had unsuccessfully searched for evidence of the tiger in the past few decades. He said situations such as Ted Turner's reward were "just a gimmick" and that if there were any tigers left it would be under 10. "There's no shortage of people who believe they've seen them. Whether or not they have is completely different." Mr Mooney said there had not been a serious search for the tiger for 12 years, despite the current report of one sighting each month. "It's highly unlikely there are any left. There's no hard evidence that one existed after 1936," he said. Mr Mooney said scientists should concentrate on cloning animals in danger of extinction, not the tiger which would then be turned into a "freak show" in captivity. As for Mr Bailey, he has a long-standing agreement with the Tasmanian museum - that if he finds a tiger he will throw it on the desk and the champagne will be cracked.
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18 Feb 2001 AUSTRALIA:
Species' fate in hands of public.
THYLACINE expert and author Bob Paddle believes the fate of wildlife and environment is in the hands of scientists and the public. "One small ray of hope may be found in the history of the extinction of the thylacine and similar species: the first casualty is always truth," he writes in his recently released book, The Last Tasmanian Tiger.
"The frequency with which those individuals hell-bent on environmental destruction for personal economic gain have been forced to lie blatantly in public about the behaviour and population numbers of their scapegoated species suggests their fear of the truth and the possibility that scientists may still be able to capture popular opinion."
The Melbourne-based researcher believes scientists were in a position to save the thylacine from extinction last century. Dr Paddle said political and economic forces worked against science.
"It is questionable whether, granted a knowledge of the extinction of the thylacine, Australian zoologists and comparative psychologists are any better equipped to deal with conservative political beliefs and aggressive economic rationalism today," he said.
Source: SUNDAY TASMANIAN 18/02/2001 P9
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09 Sep 1999 AUSTRALIA:
State urged to join family's quest.
By Anne Barbeliuk.
Australian Museum and the family which is funding research into cloning a thylacine yesterday urged Tasmania to become a partner in the project. The Griffiths family, which is financially underpinning the project, has its roots in Tasmania's convict past. Randolph Griffiths said yesterday his family's donation was partly motivated by ancestral ties. He said his great-great grandfather, Abraham Rheuben, was deported to Tasmania for stealing a sovereign in 1827. "For this reason we have always been very fond of Tasmania," he said. Mr Griffiths said the cutting-edge research would require collaboration with Tasmania. "We want to talk to the Government down there as well," he said. "We hope to have a partnership in this rare scientific scheme." While not wanting to reveal the dollar value of the Rheuben Griffiths Trust, Mr Griffiths said it would allow funding for three years' research. The formation of the trust was announced on Tuesday by the NSW Government, which also contributed $20,000. The trust, set up in partnership with the Australian Museum, is dedicated to cloning the Tasmanian tiger. Mr Griffiths and his brother, Owen, a scientist based in Mauritius, decided to back the Australian Museum research after reading about it in a Sydney newspaper.