Thylacine Read Online Free PDF

door and a baited release mechanism. The tiger had been around the camp for some time so it was not too long before it was caught in the box. To remove him from the trap they placed a rope noose, attached to the end of a long pole, around his neck. After that it was a simple job to hobble him and muzzle his mouth. Placed on the back of a horse he was delivered to Westbury Zoo where he was put on exhibition to the public.
    J OHN G OULDING, G EILSTON B AY
    E xtinction has always been integral to the life process, but when, as in the case of the thylacine, it is both manifestly unnatural and recent, it becomes our ineluctable duty to learn from the experience. Many have already done so. Alongside its positive allure and mystique as a tourism and quality-brand symbol, the loss of the thylacine glaringly symbolises wanton, careless destruction of the natural world.
    Too late, Tasmanians realised that their champion marsupial carnivore occupied a vulnerable niche in the island’s ecosystem. Thylacines were neither pest nor vermin but simply a perceived obstacle to nineteenth-century progress. And, whether snared or shot, they were also a source of bounty income.
    Prior to European settlement, thylacine numbers may have been around the 5000 mark. While the true figure can never be known, this is a reasonable estimate, based on predator/ land-requirement studies. Tasmania is approximately the same size as Ireland or Sri Lanka, or West Virginia or Hokkaido, with over 30 per cent of its land surface permanently locked away as World Heritage Area and protected parkland. Much of this area is inaccessible.
    Five thousand is not a great number. What would it take to decimate this population in just one century, to the extent that it could not even find refuge in those wild areas of the state? Human predation, at a minimum, accounted for over two thousand thylacines presented for government bounty between 1888 and 1912. Many hundreds had been killed long before then, in response to a sheep-protecting private bounty and by hunting, already disrupting the population’s stability. Habitat alteration simultaneously compacted the animal’s range. On top of this, at the beginning of the twentieth century a virulent, possibly bacterial, infection may have fatally attacked many marsupial animals, including the thylacine. But there has been no conclusive evidence to support this as a contributing factor to its decline.
    Naturalists, scientists and others, such as the artist John Gould, had been warning of the thylacine’s possible demise since the middle of the nineteenth century. Such was the animal’s lot, although sightings continue to this day and, feasibly, it is in those locked-away and inaccessible areas of Tasmania that conditions may allow for a remnant population to have survived. It would have to be a remarkable throw of the dice:
    Top carnivores, including eagles, tigers, and great white sharks, are predestined by their perch at the apex of the food web to be big in size and sparse in numbers. They live on such a small portion of life’s available energy as always to skirt the edge of extinction, and they are the first to suffer when the ecosystem around them starts to erode. 1
    Despite the odds against its survival, the thylacine’s extinction is not automatically proven. Two primary points are at issue. The first is that a species will become extinct if its numbers drop below the critical mass needed to sustain the gene pool, if the gene pool is limiting. The second is whether a species can survive once forced into a relatively difficult, increasingly shrinking wild environment. After millions of years of evolving as a specialised predator, what mechanisms would it have for ‘adapting’ to rapid, deleterious change? 2
    Scientists distinguish between mass extinctions and ‘background’ or ‘random’ extinctions, the latter occurring as a normal evolutionary feature, as first set out in