Another cracker Karl!
Dogs balls.

And shit sticks.

We KNOW… but we still need the money. The fox money has dried up, Macquarie Island looks s-h-a-k-e-y… Dave we have an election coming up!!

This inane photoshop-style job seems to rest on the premise that DFTD is obviously caused by logging.  As done to death at http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php?/weblog/comments/threats-to-the-devil/ there are actually no reasons to believe logging caused DFTD (although it can’t be ruled out entirely) and some reasons to believe it probably didn’t.

Not quite so fast, Dr Kev.  DFTD was first detected in an area of rich devil habitat bombarded with known and suspected carcinogens and mutagens in many mixtures by Dr Kev’s woodchip aviators.

There is almost no hope we will ever know what originally triggered the mutation. In the meanwhile, the leading suspect, on the basis of probability,  remains Dr Kev’s chippers.

I suggest that forestry’s cooperative researchers get straight to work on research conclusively tracing the disease back get to scraps from a greenie picnic. 

John Hayward

Wayward’s claim that the leading suspect, on the basis of probability, is “chippers” shows how little he has followed discussion such as that on the thread I posted a link to.

The disease was first detected within a national park (which is hardly “bombarded” with toxins known or suspected, whatever the issues of possible drift).  Adjacent to that national park were specific poisoning events targetted directly at devils, fitting the time frame for the likely origin of the disease, and estimated to have killed several hundred of them.  I get the impression from his comments that Wayward is not even aware of these poisoning incidents, indirectly reported by Dr Obendorf on another thread.

As the debate with David Alford on the thread shows, you have to go several kilometres from the furthest corner of the national park to even find a forestry clearfall coupe.  So Wayward’s first paragraph is only true if you are talking on an extremely broad geographic scale (and minus some of the hyperbole). While it’s possible for a devil to develop the initial cancer as a result of an event in a coupe way outside the park and walk into the park, or as a result of drift of chemicals into the park, the mere possibility does not establish that it is the most likely way it happened.  Of course, Wayward will continue to believe forestry is the leading suspect, but that is because of his biases.

The flippant suggestion re picnic scraps is an interesting one that is actually well worth taking seriously (without, of course, any assumptions re the politics of the picnicker).  Carcinogenic litter is as good a hypothesis as many and a better one than some.  But there will still be people who (like the “cartoonist”) cannot see past the blinkered view that forestry must be the culprit, although as John correctly (for once) points out, there is almost no hope of ever knowing.

Dr Bonham. For an expert in snails, you seem able to stamp authoritatively over a vast range of subjects.
Do you only defend your employers or do you just have a soft spot for land clearing? I’m thinking of doing a cartoon about you. I wonder what color your shell is?

Is it my imagination , that once taken and bred outside of the Tassie environment,  that there has not been a single case of the facial tumour’s ?

                    d.d.

Karl, thanks for the charming threat to caricature me in one of your lame so-called “cartoons”.  The last people to attempt to caricature me to push their ideological views were the Fellowship of Christian University Students, an evangelical fundie group who painted an anorexic unhappy cartoon of me in the university tunnel. I was very quickly able to have them forced to remove it.  Sauntering past their removal efforts with a big grin on my face was most enjoyable.  I advise you not to even think about getting anything defamatory about me accepted here, in particular not anything related to my employment.

And once again (sigh) I work from time to time for a wide range of different employers, and once again (sigh) at this particular moment I am not working in the forest industries.  Now how about you see if you can address my actual arguments?  No, of course you can’t, because as previous threads have shown, you are shallow, hotheaded and dim.

Don (#8), because the devils that are taken interstate for captive breeding come from captive colonies that were always free of the disease, that’s right, they don’t develop tumours.

Calling ‘Doctor Snail’. If my cartoons are ‘lame’ I’m sure you have a really good reason to respond to them. BTW Did you discover that snails flourish when all the native vegetation has been cleared? Is this part of your secret plan to ‘snailify’ Tasmania? If I wanted to help ‘snailify Tasmania
would I vote Liberal or Labor. Awaiting you spiral wisdom with anticipation.

Dr Bonham makes a point that you have go several kilometres from the furthest corner of the National Park to even find a clear fell coup. Devils are scavengers and known to travel great distances in their search for food.
An interesting point he raises is that they may have eaten carcinogenic litter left behind by picnickers and if this is even a faint possibility, “The Tarkine Tourist Road” is even a bigger threat to the devils than was previously thought.
As for interstate devils being free from the “disease,’ perhaps they were never sprayed or had eaten any contaminated food.

Karl’s 1:48 PM post just confirms the character reference I previously gave him.  Karl, I have a refereed publication that gives plenty of information about how well (actually fairly badly compared with other invertebrates) snails perform in exotic eucalypt and pine plantations if it really interests you, but I doubt it does and your attention span is clearly way too short.  More concerningly for your ideological ranting, I have been involved in a study that shows truly remarkable rates of land snail recovery from clearfall, burn and sow treatments within about six years after logging.  If you really want to get rid of most of the native snail fauna permanently, the main ways to do it are to either urbanise an area or convert it to stock pasture or food cropping. 

Max (#11), if the devils in the Tarkine are susceptible to the disease then it will be all through there in a matter of years anyway so using it as an argument against the road is only a holding strategy.  Furthermore, however it first started, the disease spreads directly from devil to devil by biting and fighting, not from spraying or what they eat.

I doubt the Tarkine road would lead to a significant increase in the amount of carcinogenic litter available for devils to eat on a statewide basis, given how widespread devils are in areas where litter loads are already enormous.

Dr Bonham (#12)  65 years ago the Tasmanian Tiger and Tasmanian Devil were thought to be extinct and the Brush Possum was also close to extinction. The reason given at the time was distemper which they had little immunity from. The Ring Tail Possum at a later date also caught the same disease and is still recovering.
Devils have always injured themselves fighting and logic dictates that this cancer most likely is caused by their immune system being weakened. At the same time as the cancer rate showed up in the devils, the cancer rate in humans in Tasmania went into a steep climb. There is now strong evidence that this steep climb in the cancer rate in humans is connected to the increase of spray residue in our drinking water, so perhaps the devils were the mine canaries.
Stopping the Tarkine road may well be a holding strategy as you claim but the holding strategy maybe all that is needed to save them.

Well Karl , there it is , problem solved, the “Prince of Narkness” say’s that the the tumours are spread from biting and fighting !  So I guess those in captive breeding have been taught not to bite, and fight, which is quite a feat seeing as the little buggers have been doing it for millions of years.

    Glad that’s been cleared up.

                      d.d.

You know Kevin my respect for you is increasing by the day. By studying snails you have uncovered almost all of the wisdom of the universe, because the whole universe could not exist without the humble snail. I call it ‘extensible knowledge’.

Obviously you have used it to gain valuable insights into the Tasmanian electoral process, as well as the supreme right some Tasmanians have to sell parts of the island to their mates.

Of course, destroying rare natural habitat to create homes for snails is one of the reasons a person of your formidable intellect evolved from reptiles. To sum-up, the biggest lesson any of us has ever learned from the snail is patience. If we just keep trucking the trees away one load at a time, we will have snail habitat that will be the envy of the world.

The last people to attempt to caricature me to push their ideological views were the Fellowship of Christian University Students, an evangelical fundie group who painted an anorexic unhappy cartoon of me in the university tunnel.

Seems you have a long history. Now what would cause them to do something like that?

Evan Roley had two repetitive nightmares that caused his retirement.

One was the full knowledge that Autumn forest burns would haunt him forever and a day and that no amount of platitudes and rationalisations could overcome the public’s ire.

The second was a horrible premonition that Devil Facial Tumour disease would one day be scientifically pinned onto forestry’s widespread chemical usage.

What CEO could live comfortably with such bad dreams?

Max, as you should be aware the issue with devils is one or a very small number of devils getting a cancer and then this cancer being able to transmit from devil to devil by biting and fighting.  This is not at all comparable to an increase in the number of humans developing cancer independently without contagion; it is a completely different mechanism of increase of disease rate.  If, as you suggest, the cancer is caused by devil immune systems being weakened then (i) we would expect such cancers to pop up in new discrete localities all over the place, instead of spreading from a single general area as they have done (ii) we would expect devils living deep in national parks and away from disturbance to be immune, which they are not. 

As for your claim that there is strong evidence linking the cancer increase in humans to spray residue, feel free to point me to any other thread where this evidence has been convincingly presented.  Given that corellation doesn’t necessarily equal causation I would need to see more detailed reasoning than just broad evidence of increases in areas that happened to be affected by spraying.

My point about the holding strategy thing is that within a decade or so the disease is likely to be all through the Tarkine anyway.  So once this is the case, what will opponents of the road use as their main argument then?  If valid at all, it seems more like an argument for delaying the road’s construction than for permanently halting it.

Karl (currently showing as #15), your pimplebrained strawmanning concerning snails and whatever you misconstrue my views to be is just more evidence that your contributions, both verbal and pictorial, are an utter waste of bandwidth.

Gerry, I know I had quite a few run-ins with the FOCUSites, especially in the late 1990s (for instance over their adherence to illiberal doctrine, their use of heavy-handed promotion methods that were offensive to many students and their willing acceptance of the coercively collected S+A fees of unbelievers.)  However I don’t recall exactly what had been going on with them prior to the tunnel caricature stoush.

I along with many others, note that there appears to be a similar vein of untoward commentary appearing on this Tasmanian Times site.
Surely there must come a time when this sort of conduct becomes no longer acceptable to the people whom enjoy posting on such sites as this as made possible through the good graces of Lindsay Tuffin.
As such, I believe a certain amount of self-aware moderation is essential to maintain the standards previously recognized and to appease the increasing number of people whom have chosen to join in with the discussions on this forum.
A lively forum is healthy for us all, though an abusive forum soon begins to lose those persons whom wish to pursue issues of substance, rather than put up with bellicose inanities.