Nick Mooney - questions and answers

About the expert

Nick Mooney is a wildlife biologist, write, conservationist and educator. For many decades he worked with the Parks Departments in Tasmania and was responsible for collating and investigating reports of thylacine sightings. Nick was involved in the comprehensive search carried out by authorities following the 1982 sighting made by park ranger Hans Naarding. More recently Nick has been involved in Tasmanian devil conservation, working as a guide and with raptor rehabilitation in Tasmania.

How many documentaries on the thylacine are you aware of?

Nick responds:

By documentaries I understand movie or video recordings. There have been at least 40 documentaries from the early days of film and TV that I know of. There would be others both local and done overseas that I do not know of. I have been involved with at least 15.

Has anyone played a sound for you that you thought was possibly thylacine?

Nick responds:

No I have had sounds played to me that I have not heard before but none match what was reported for Thylacine.

Thylacine have distinctive feet - in your view do the planter pad to toe pad ratios of 1:6 to 1:7 for thylacine feet make sense in comparison to canine of 1:2 to 1:3?

Nick responds:

Yes and they apply for all quadruped marsupials I have examined. I have found no overlap between equivalent prints for dog and those marsupials.

With the Thylacine jaw structure not being as powerful as wolves or dogs do you believe they preyed more on small mammals, and fowl instead of Kangaroos or Wallabies?

Nick responds:

It was only ever modelled or projected as not being as powerful –never directly measured. Thylacines were large animals – up to 35kg.

Even if not as bite-strong as the same sized canid they still have an impressive jaw and large teeth so I expect they could kill prey as large as themselves. They of course can also kill much smaller things.

I also expect they took what was most available so would concentrate on different prey in different places, just like most predators do.

Remember canids kill very large prey by ripping but thylacines would have been restricted to a heavy bite and maybe shake. The narrow muzzle suggests precision to me so I suggest they focused on animals about half their own weight killing with a big, precise bite.

Wallabies fit that prey description. There are direct observations of them killing large animals including hunting dogs so I am not
enthusiastic in using modelling instead of direct observation. If the modelling conflicts with direct observation maybe the modelling has to be revisited and the direct observation too.

Differences can be resolved by applying about the normal curve - most Thylacine prey would be smaller than the thylacine but some would be larger and some much smaller. Devils kill much larger animals if they are partially incapacitated but also kill tadpoles. Animals motives (hunger) also effects what they may do. Young raptors often kill larger things than do older, more experienced individuals but if they survive, eventually learn what is safe to kill. Prey populations and therefore availability also change seasonally and year to year and predators have to be flexible enough to encompass this.

With the extinction of the Tasmanian Emu do you believe this had a detrimental affect on the Thylacines food source

Nick responds:

I doubt they killed adult emus very often. They are dangerous prey.

Any thoughts on the Attard study which showed that the structure of the skull and jaws are relatively weaker than those of a similarly sized canid.

Nick responds:

Comments as above.

Regarding the supposed shooting / discovery of a Thylacine's body (or possibly more than one even) at Adamsfield in 1990, did you ever have sight of the series of photos that were supposedly taken of it at the time and/or did you/the department officially investigate that situation at all? Any thoughts or conclusions would be appreciated.

Nick responds:

We were not told about it. The first supposed photos I saw were associated with comments from Col Bailey only a few years ago. I still do not know who supposedly did the shooting / made the discovery and have not seen the original photos.

Can you give the approx dates of the large private expeditions that seem to remain somewhat classified.

Nick responds:

Most expeditions were private and its up to those ‘owning’ them to talk about them or not. They sometimes contacted the department or even me privately and request confidentiality. By large I understand not $ spent but area covered with reasonable effort. One might also say 10000 camera nights (eg 10 cameras for 1000 nights) is large. Peter Wright did a large one in the mid 1980s, Dave Watts and Stew Blackhall did several through the early 1990s, there was a French one in the mid 1990s using a pet sheep as a lure. Ned terry did several large expeditions through the 1990s and early 2000s. So called ‘Tigerman’ reportedly did his own through the early/mid 2000s although being anonymous its impossible to know if they were real expeditions. There are scores if not hundreds of cameras out there these days, most private. I am in contact with 3 ongoing searches by enthusiasts. I’d call them large searches because they go on for a long time, as above. No doubt I simply don’t know of others. Some of what of seem large searches because of the publicity prove to be very small if done at all.

If he had to look for a thylacine today where would he look?

Nick responds:

Aha!

One might consider a place with lots of wallabies and possums and refuges that is large enough to contain at least say 10 Thylacines in contact but small or remote enough to have those thylacines overlooked. Much of coastal western Tasmania suits that as does some patches of decent soils (which concentrate values) in the highlands and mid south. The good soils of Granville Hbr are an example but they are farmed with people living there so I doubt thylacines are overlooked there. However, and it’s a big HOWEVER, we are simply not as good as we think we are at finding very rare things.

Is there any reason to suspect the disease which affected the thylacine in the early part of the century had any connection with the decline in devil numbers in 1950? In either case, if the 1950 decline is attributable to disease do we have any idea what it was?

Nick responds:

The supposed disease(s) were not properly recorded and it can only be speculated what impact they had. Mostly we just have some anecdotes - there were no even vaguely consistent measures of abundance. The current devil disease DFTD is obvious but such a disease doesn’t have to be obvious (eg a more visibly subtle or internal caner). Maybe it was something like that. Some marsupials are inclined to pneumonia even in apparent epidemics. Perhaps toxoplasmosis had a very high impact early in its career here. Distemper seems very unlikely to jump from eutherian to marsupial.

Do you still search for thylacines in your private time ?

Nick responds:

Occasionally but more in the course of doing other surveys or having fun in the bush. I help monitor devils and other wildlife and do some mine assessments in remote areas so always keep an eye out. Footprints are my key expertise.

What is your best thylacine report after Hans Naarding..?

Nick responds:

There are many arguably better because they simply had multiple observers none of whom knew anything about thylacines but just reported what they saw. Hans would likely agree with that. I have one daytime report from near Zeehan of 2 cars with 7 people (who didn’t know each other car to car) the first car passing the animal standing on the roadside and stopping and the second parking before it.
Daytime. Each car was 20 m from the animal by my reconstruction and they had 7 seconds view. So they were either right or lying.

If you had to put a %, how certain are you that 1080 isn't going to affect the native wildlife? Any idea what caused the drop off in sighting reports from the 80's to the 90's?

Nick responds:

1080 is much misunderstood. It is found in some Australian plants as a plant defence against browsers. So most Australian animals have evolutionary exposure and some resistance. Devils for instance are, kg for kg about 34 times as resistant as a dog (with no evolutionary exposure). Wedge-tailed eagles have one of the highest resistances of any bird or mammal, much higher than say Golden eagles which not being in Australia have very little resistance. Herbivores are less resistant than most carnivores. This means amounts that might harm wallabies probably won’t harm devils or our eagles but might kill dogs.

The amount ingested per size of the individual animal and that individuals health and fitness and that species’ physiological resistance governs what happens. High doses of 1080 were (and still are sometimes I think) used to systematically kill wallabies but there has NEVER been a native carnivore proven to be killed by one of these operational culls.

Devils are very resistant, spotted tailed quolls and eastern quolls somewat less resistant. We can speculate where Thylacines sat but its likely they too had considerable resistance. None has resistance to say Strychnine. The widespread rabbit strychnine poisonings of the 50s, 60s and later other synthetic poisons could have been very damaging to remaining Thylacines.The 80s and 90s saw much (illegal) poisoning of devils eagles and ravens using organophosphates, deadly to everything. But it was still mostly in rural areas. I’m not sure sighting did drop off in that period although reports did.

That period also saw a cynicism and scepticism enter Tasmania, something for which we are now (in)famous, and with it maybe came enhanced reluctance to expose oneself to ridicule. Hence less reports. Once the department paid the issue less attention (by the mid1990s) then reports drifted towards private enthusiasts. I suspect there are just as many ‘events’ now and they are reported as often but those reports are dispersed and kept private.