It is a good thing devils are plucky, as they are facing a great challenge. In the mid-1990s a female devil developed a cancerous tumour, most likely on her face or mouth. While fighting over a carcass or scrapping with a mate, she bit another devil. Then something strange happened. As she bit down, her cancer cells were transferred to her victim’s wound. The unruly cells survived and grew on their new host as a parasite. Soon after this incident, the female would have died, whether from the cancer or by other means. But her cancer cells lived on, spreading from devil to devil and killing individuals within months of infection.
The first hint of the epidemic came in 1996 when a photographer snapped a shot of an infected devil in the island’s north-east. Scientists scrambled to work out what was causing these disfiguring tumours, now named Devil Facial Tumour Disease or DFTD.
It was not until 2006 that researchers announced that DFTD was a contagious cancer. The chromosomes in the cancer cells were ‘grossly abnormal’, but across individuals they were almost identical, showing that they came from a single origin. Contagious cancers are rare, so this was explosive news. The only other vertebrate we know to be plagued by contagious cancer is the domestic dog.
To learn more I visited Rodrigo Hamede, a researcher at the University of Tasmania’s School of Natural Sciences. Hamede started working with devils in 2004, early in the epidemic, and he was distressed by what he saw. ‘I spent so much time in the field catching the same animals. You would see them in the pouch, then you would see them breeding, so you were attached to the individual. Then suddenly seeing them sick, deteriorating and dying was quite emotionally draining,’ he explains. At this time there was a real fear that DFTD might completely wipe devils off the planet within decades.
