Tasmanian Devils Scream. The Sound Carries a Kilometer.

The name was given by European settlers who heard the sounds coming from the darkness and could not identify the source. Screaming, coughing, growling, and a low-pitched devil-like shriek that carries across a kilometer of Tasmanian bush at night. When they finally saw the animal producing it, a black, dog-sized marsupial with a disproportionately large head, the name had already stuck.

Sarcophilus harrisii, the Tasmanian devil, is the largest carnivorous marsupial alive. It became the largest after the thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger, was hunted to extinction in 1936. The devil’s jaw produces the highest bite force relative to body size of any living mammal, strong enough to crush bone completely. A devil feeding on a carcass consumes everything, bones, fur, and all, leaving nothing behind. A group of devils can reduce a wallaby carcass to nothing in under 30 minutes.

The vocalizations are social signals produced during feeding competitions, where multiple devils gather at a carcass and establish dominance through sound and posture before physical contact. The screaming is negotiation. It is loud, it is alarming, and it works well enough that actual fights, which can cause serious injury, are relatively rare compared to the frequency of vocal confrontations.

Devil Facial Tumor Disease

In 1996, a wildlife photographer in northeastern Tasmania photographed a devil with severe facial tumors. Within a decade, the disease had spread across most of the island and had reduced the devil population by over 80 percent. Devil facial tumor disease, DFTD, is one of only a handful of known transmissible cancers, tumors that spread between individuals as living cells rather than through viral or bacterial infection.

The cancer spreads when devils bite each other during feeding competitions and mating, which they do frequently and with considerable force. Tumor cells transferred in the bite implant in the new host and grow, eventually causing facial tumors that prevent the animal from eating, leading to starvation within months of the first visible symptoms.

The disease has been the subject of intensive research and conservation intervention. Insurance populations have been established on mainland Australia and on offshore islands free of the disease. Vaccine development programs are ongoing. Some wild populations have shown signs of rapid evolutionary response, with genetic changes in immune-related genes appearing in affected populations within just a few generations, an unusually fast evolutionary response that has attracted significant scientific interest.

The Pouch and the Race

Female Tasmanian devils give birth to up to 30 joeys after a gestation of 21 days, each the size of a grain of rice. The pouch has four teats. The first four joeys to reach the pouch and attach to a teat survive. The rest do not. It is one of the more brutal reproductive systems in the mammal world, and it produces young that are among the most altricial of any marsupial, spending months attached to the teat before developing enough to move independently within the pouch.

The devil that screams across a kilometer of Tasmanian darkness, that crushes bone with the strongest relative bite force of any mammal, that is fighting a transmissible cancer that has killed most of its species in 30 years, is also an animal whose survival begins with a race across a few centimeters of maternal fur. The contrast between the ferocity of the adult and the fragility of the newborn is one of the wider ones in the animal kingdom.