Thylacine

Philip Derriman asks if time is running out too quickly for the Tasmanian tiger.

The idea that the Tasmanian tiger has survived in remote areas of the island State is by no means a fanciful one. Some of Tasmania's most eminent biologists subscribe to it. In fact, if you consult the Tasmanian Government's official wildlife listings today, you would find that the Tasmanian tiger is categorised as an endangered species, not an extinct one.

Yet, even those who believe there are still Tasmanian tigers out there somewhere, appear to be increasingly pessimistic about the animal's future. The cause of their concern is simply that the species has not made the recovery it ought to have made by now. From this they conclude that even if the Tasmanian tiger has survived until 1989, time may now be running out for it.

There is a good deal of hearsay evidence - although no hard evidence - to support the theory that the tiger has survived.

We know that epidemic diseases - and to a lesser extent, hunting and trapping by farmers - wiped out most of the animals earlier this century, but it can be argued that disease and hunting could not possibly have wiped out them all. In such circumstances, you would expect a few isolated groups of them to survive in remote areas, only rarely being sighted by farmers or passing motorists.

For years, the theory goes, the animals would stay largely out of sight, gradually growing in numbers, until eventually their expanding population would begin to spill over into farming areas. Then, you would expect them to be seen quite often, or to be caught occasionally killing sheep, or sometimes to be hit by cars and to be found dead by the roads.

Tasmanian devils, for example, are living proof of how rapidly a species can recover. Forty years ago, they too seemed to be in danger of extinction. Today, they are found all over Tasmania in near-pest proportions. Indeed, in some areas, farmers have been given permission to get rid of them by trapping them, and one farmer is said to have caught as many as 20 devils in a night by using a cow's carcass as bait.

Tasmanian tigers - naturalists prefer to call them thylacines - are (or were) much bigger marsupials and could not breed so quickly. But it is 53 years since the last thylacine died in a Hobart zoo, and if groups of them really had survived in the wild, they ought to have shown some evidence by now of a revival.

At the least, you would expect more and more sightings of them to be reported over a wider area. But this hasn't happened. If anything, the number of reported sightings has declined.

Not all the experts are worried. A recognised authority on thylacines, Dr Bob Green, of Launceston's Queen Victoria Museum, remains convinced that the thylacine is alive and well and will eventually become plentiful again. Moreover, interest in the thylacine has now spread to Japan.

The Japanese have already become fascinated with the Tasmanian devil, and Japanese film crews have begun arriving regularly to film devils in their native habitat. There is talk now of a Japanese financed search for the thylacine and last month, a Tokyo daily newspaper published a large article about the animal by a journalist sent to Tasmania specially to write it.

According to Mr Nick Mooney, a biologist in Tasmania's Parks, Wildlife and Heritage Department, thylacine "sightings" have probably averaged 40 or more a year, although only about 10 a year are reported to his department.

The reports vary in reliability, of course. For instance, the most reliable report this year came from two people who had been driving along a dirt road a few months ago in the far north-west of Tasmania. They said an animal which they recognised as a thylacine, both from its appearance (striped back, long rigid tail) and from its rather stiff, awkward gait, walked across the road less than 50 metres ahead of them and disappeared into the bush.

Just last week, ABC Radio reported in Tasmania that a fisherman, apparently a reliable witness, claimed to have seen a thylacine three times in three weeks near a lake in the north-west. The man refused to have his name or the location of the sightings broadcast, but this week wildlife authorities were trying to contact him.

The most convincing "sighting" of recent years was made in roughly the same area. In 1982, a Tasmanian Government biologist sleeping in a four-wheel-drive vehicle in the bush in north-western Tasmania got up in the middle of the night and flashed his torch out the window. In the light of the torch, only six metres away, he saw an animal which he felt certain was a thylacine. Struggling to reach for his camera, he moved the torch beam from the animal for an instant - and the animal disappeared.

Because of the nature, frequency and location of these reported sightings, Mr Mooney's own belief is that at least until recently thylacines, were surviving in a number of remote areas in Tasmania - possibly the far north-west, mid-north-west, mid-west coast, central highlands and far north-east.

"What concerns me is that other evidence hasn't come to light," he says. "If the thylacine was following the usual population cycle, it ought to have become more conspicuous now - we should be finding hard evidence of it.

"My worry is that we may be dealing here with a population that's become fragmented and has run into genetic breeding problems. For all we know the species may be on its last legs right now. I sometimes think we should be doing more about it, but then you face the question, 'What can we do?' I don't know anyone who has the answer to that."

The cost of doing anything worthwhile would probably be enormous. One of Tasmania's best-known authorities on the thylacine, the former university biologist Dr Eric Guiler, thinks the only action wildlife authorities could take would be to conduct a huge photographic exercise.

"You'd have to saturate the whole countryside with cameras and hope to catch a male and a female. Then you'd fence off 40 hectares, put them in and leave them to it. The cost of all this would be colossal, and you'd have no guarantee before you started it that you'd even find one.

"I'm afraid I see the thylacine's prospects as rather gloomy. Ten years ago I was confident it was coming back, but now I'm very worried. I still think there are a few left in one or two places.

"In fact, there's one area in the north-west where I'm reasonably confident there are some, although it's private property and not accessable. But I fear we're getting right down to the bottom line.

"The number of sightings has diminished and they're confined now to two or three areas. This may be simply because the thylacine hasn't had much publicity lately - publicity nearly always results in fresh reports of sightings - but I think it probably reflects a declining population.

"It's not easy to say what we could have done, but I'm sure than 100 years from now, if the thylacine is extinct, people will condemn us for not making a bigger effort to save it.

"When you consider how much money the Federal Government is spending in other areas of conservation, I suppose it is extraordinary, really, that so little has been done."