IN WHAT seems like a desperate bid to survive, Tasmanian devils are showing precocious sexual behaviour in populations that have been devastated by the fatal devil facial tumour disease.
Menna Jones of the University of Tasmania in Hobart monitored the age at which females produced their first litter in five populations of Tasmanian devils before and after the disease had become established.
Female Tasmanian devils usually breed at 2, 3 and 4 years old, with up to four pups per litter, then die at 5 years old. The team found that where the disease is established, life expectancy falls to 2 to 3 years. In some of these groups, up to 80 per cent of females bred at 1 year old compared with less than 10 per cent before the cancer appeared (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ).
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鈥淲e found a sixteenfold increase in precocious breeding. They are fitting in an extra litter when they are teenagers,鈥� says Jones. The trigger for early breeding is unknown, but Jones suggests that it could be increased food supplies as a result of reduced competition from older individuals.
Devil facial tumour disease is a communicable cancer spread by biting that was first reported in 1996. By 2007 it had spread across more than half the animal鈥檚 range in Tasmania, leading some experts to predict that the disease could make the animal extinct in the wild within 25 years.
