Thylacine: Specimen Or It Didn't Happen

This week a group of Tasmanians (press conference here) claimed to have seen and to have footage of a living thylacine, a species which has not been confirmed to exist since the last known specimen died in captivity on September 7, 1936.    No zoologist has yet accepted this extremely blurry footage as being of a thylacine, and many wildlife observers consider it is very likely to be a spotted-tailed quoll.

You can see a longer video here.  It contains unconvincing (compare actual accounts) "barking", the video above, something unidentifable nosing the camera, and a bunch of Where's Wally pics in which you can just make out what might be the eyes of something if you try very hard.  When I slow down the main video frame by frame I can see blurry paler patches on the animal consistent with the spotting on a spotted-tailed quoll.  The most interesting thing about the videos is actually the large number of lyrebirds (introduced to Tasmania) that they show.

I thought it might be of some interest to someone out there to outline my position regarding this poor animal the thylacine, and the intermittent circus of alleged "sightings", "photos" and "videos" surrounding it.  As usual, I am expressing my own view and not necessarily the view of any organisation I belong to or any employer I from time to time work for.

Lapoinya Scrapes The Barrel Of Tasmania's Forests Conflict

Tasmania has seen some big environmental contests down the years.  Lake Pedder, the Franklin dam, Farmhouse Creek, Wesley Vale, the Bell Bay pulp mirage, Ralphs Bay.  The latest flashpoint, Lapoinya, isn't one of them.  To many veterans on either side it must be astonishing that we now have a barney over the logging of forty-nine hectares of regrowth - that anyone would bother protesting it, let alone getting arrested over it, or on the other hand that anyone would bother with the logging or arresting.  To put it into perspective, bushfires in Tasmania have burnt almost 900 Lapoinya-coupes worth of native vegetation in the past fortnight alone.

The Lapoinya argument seems like nothing more than a vintage example of Sayre's Law (the contest is so bitter precisely because the stakes are so small).  Behind what has become a comically petty contest in the context of the battles of the past, however, are some players with a bigger game to play.  But before I get onto specifics of Lapoinya (then all that), I'd like to look at how we got here.

Tasmanian Devils Not On The "Verge of Extinction"

This extinction talk is all a bit of a yawn really.  (Image credit: www.waynemaclean.com)

Late last year, fifteen Tasmanian devils were released on Maria Island, an action that had been in the pipeline for many years.  You can watch cute footage of their cautious emergence into their new environment here.
Devil populations statewide are being ravaged by Devil Facial Tumour Disease (warning: link contains some remarkably ugly and potentially distressing images), a very unusual contagious cancer spread when animals bite each other during fights, that was first photographed in the north-east of Tasmania in 1996.   The Save the Tasmanian Devil website noted:

"As at February 2011, there has been an 84% decline in average sightings of devils across Tasmania during the annual spotlight surveys. In the north-east region, where signs of DFTD were first reported, there has been a 96% decline of average sightings."

A figure of 91% reduction in spotlighting results has been given in some recent media reports.

What's Green, Tasmanian And Probably Isn't Endangered?

The Miena Jewel Beetle! (Castiarina insculpta)

The MJB: Giving extinction rumours the finger since 2004!

It's only tenuously related to politics, as a classic case of threatened species being considered firstly extinct and then endangered when in practice hardly anything is known about it - a problem which pads threatened species lists (especially Tasmania's) with unjustified or exaggerated listings, creates "green tape" and distorts conservation priorities.  The problem is, of course, that many of these species do not even become the focus of serious research attention until they are listed.  And even so, much of the research is done on an amateur basis, as it was in the recent first known find of the species in numbers, in which I was involved.  In fact, I found the first one of several found by our group faster than I could spot an 11% swing to Andrew Wilkie in the Sandfly Polling Booth!   You can see a rather low quality camera-video shot by me and read some more text about it here.  More pictures (by people who know how to use a camera!) on the Tasmanian Field Naturalists Club Flickr page here.

This post represents my own opinions  facts only.

Update (1 Mar):  See the ABC TV news item here.  Further searches through February have continued to reveal good numbers.  I can add that there was one other live sighting in recent times - by a very experienced entomologist who seems to have never drawn any public attention to the sighting or logged it, but fortunately, he did one day casually mention it to me.  It was at that site where we first found the species, but we've found it to be quite widespread in the area.