Image: Photo courtesy of The Tasmanian National Museum and Art Gallery
Humans alone were responsible for the Tasmanian tiger's extinction in the 20th century, according to a new study that shoots down claims that disease also doomed the meat-eating marsupial.
More officially known as thylacines, Tasmanian tigers (Thylacinus cynocephalus) looked somewhat like striped coyotes and were found throughout most of the Australian island of Tasmania before Europeans settled there in 1803.
Starting at the end of the 19th century, the Tasmanian government paid bounties for thylacine carcasses, as the animals were believed to prey on farmers' sheep and poultry. (A recent study, however, showed that the carnivores' jaws were so weak they likely couldn't have taken down anything larger than a possum.) Humans eventually hunted thylacines to extinction in the early 1900s; the last known individual died in a Tasmanian zoo in 1936.
"Many people, however, believe that bounty hunting alone could not have driven the thylacine extinct and therefore claim that an unknown disease epidemic must have been responsible," researcher Thomas Prowse, of Australia's University of Adelaide, said in a statement.
Prowse and his colleagues developed a mathematical model to evaluate whether the combined impacts of Europeans' settlement could have wiped out the thylacine, without any disease involved.
"The new model simulated the directs effects of bounty hunting and habitat loss and, importantly, also considered the indirect effects of a reduction in the thylacine's prey (kangaroos and wallabies) due to human harvesting and competition from millions of introduced sheep," Prowse said.
Indeed, their results, published this month in the Journal of Animal Ecology, showed that these impacts alone would have been powerful enough to send the Tasmanian tiger population crashing in the early 20th century.
A study out last year suggested that low genetic diversity eventually would have set the thylacine on a path to extinction even if they hadn't been hunted off the planet.
The tiger's extant cousin, the Tasmanian devil, is currently being wiped out by a contagious cancer that's been able to spread all the easier because of the devil's low genetic diversity, which cuts down a wildlife population's ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions and bounce back from disease and mass fatalities. The Tasmanian tiger, if around today, also would be exceptionally susceptible to diseases, those researchers said.
- Wipe Out: History's Most Mysterious Extinctions
- Australia's Struggling Marsupial: Photos of the Tasmanian Devil
- The 10 Weirdest Animal Discoveries of 2012
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10 Comments
Add CommentNot surprising since they are well on their way to wiping themselves out.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAdapt or die. Tough world out there.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Adapt or die" doesn't usually have to address changes on the scale of decades or even years. Just because animals go extinct doesn't mean that we have to help them along.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAfter exterminating all the original inhabitants when the Europeans invaded Tasmania, their white descendants are carrying on the traditions of their forebears with what other native species may be left on the island.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThus, civilization comes to virgin territory, demonstrating once again that 'practice makes perfect'.
So now its a new Tasmania. Not better or worse. Just different.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's a new Tasmania, true. It's a Tasmania with less biodiversity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWho really gives a c rap about those horrible creatures? They were a mistake in the first place. Had they not been in such a remote location they would never have been allowed to remain as long as they did.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst the article states that a "recent study" determined that the thylacine's jaws probably weren't powerful enough to handle anything larger than a possum. Three paragraphs later, Prowse is quoted as saying that their mathematical model "also considered the indirect effects of a reduction in the thylacine's prey (kangaroos and wallabies)". Kangaroos and wallabies are both considerably larger animals than possums. So, which is it?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLittleredtop, that's exactly what the invading extraterrestrials said about humans as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHumans wiped out Tasmanian Tigers, and Neanderthals, and Denisovians, and many more; as the mtDNA Genetic Eve existed at least some 20'000 years before the first Y Chromosome Genetic Adam, somebody should have been making women pregnant before this first genetic Adam that didn't arrive to our days. If it were true that Big Foot mtDNA is from a Human Woman, are these creatures also human? Do they have the ability to speak? How are our relations with those cousins, and does it make any change in, let us say as example, religious beliefs on things such as ethics, guilt, sin, mankind, and the fate after death?
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