Scientist leaves, as 'devil island' idea stalls
Updated
The senior scientist working to save the Tasmanian Devil from extinction says his plan to save the species has been stopped by conservationists and opponents within the state government.
Professor Hamish McCallum wants to isolate healthy wild devils on islands off Tasmania in order to protect them from a deadly facial cancer that's spreading across the state. But the concept has met with resistance.
Presenter: Felicity Ogilvie
Speakers: Professor Hamish McCallum, scientist
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MCCALLUM: I'm moving on largely for personal reasons. There have been some frustrations with this job but overall I've enjoyed it. And unfortunately as far as I know there will be nobody appointed to replace me in this role.
OGILVIE: What would you say needs to be done to make sure the Tasmanian devil doesn't die out?
MCCALLUM: Well one of the things that I'm a little frustrated hasn't happened is that there was a proposal before I arrived to actually put devils onto some offshore islands in order to insure that there were some disease-free populations. For a variety of reasons, including opposition from sections of the conservation movement, this hasn't happened yet.
And whilst there are devils in captivity now on mainland zoos to my mind it would be an absolute tragedy if the only place that there was still disease-free devils were in captivity. So to my mind it's really important that we have wild free-ranging devils doing what devils ought to do in the natural environment.
OGILVIE: You say there's been some opposition from conservationists. What else has stopped this plan of putting devils on off-shore islands of Tasmania from becoming a reality?
MCCALLUM: I think it's an attempt to be risk averse and avoid controversy by certainly some of the people within the Tasmanian Government.
There are always issues involved with putting wild animals into places that they previously didn't exist and as I said I think some sections of the conservation movement, having seen the disasters which have happened with things like cane toads and foxes being introduced, see putting any animal anywhere where it previously didn't exist is something you shouldn't do.
And whilst I think you certainly need to be cautious about it, there are some times when that's the only thing that could be done to save a species, and I think the Tasmanian devil is in that situation.
OGILVIE: How much time is left to implement this plan of putting wild disease-free devils onto islands?
MCCALLUM: We have a little bit more time than we thought we had two years ago.
One of the really big positive things that we've discovered is that there's very little transmission from parent to offspring, which means that we can get very young devils out of diseased populations and know that they're disease free.
But what we'd really like to be able to do is to make sure that the animals that we're introducing to these islands are actually wild animals rather than animals which have been in captivity for extended periods.
And if that's what we want to do then the clock is ticking. It's hard to know exactly how fast the disease is moving but certainly the option will be closed down of getting wild animals which are genuinely disease free within the next three to four years.
