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The Tale of the Tiger and the Wolf

Sheather888

Published: Feb 20, 2015

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Description

Dizzy the Thylacine and her foster family of Warrahs in 2111; mother Vixen in center, with her young male cub Dazzle to the left and sister Thistle to the right.

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As famous as Eden may be for its restored dinosaurs, it may come as surprising that a little over half of its 550 or so animal species are not reptiles at all. Eden also keeps a number of fish and amphibian species, even a number of invertebrates, and particularly, the park exhibits a myriad of fascinating mammals, comprising dozens of groups from the Cretaceous onwards to the Holocene. With just over 100 species present, ranging from the cat-sized Eohippus that can be found, if a bit unexpectedly, within the Wings complex, where they share a patch of jungle with small feathered dinosaurs, to the towering Paraceratherium pair housed in the north pasture, creatures initially restored in substitution of sauropods before any success was had with them. There are elephants and rhinos, deer and giraffes, and primitive monsters from countless eons past with no extant equivalents. Some of the creatures which leave the biggest impact at Eden, however, are neither monstrous, nor giant, nor ancient. Misunderstood, it is directly a result of our own actions that they were lost to time. They are the victims of greed and cruelty - and it is not only mammals. Birds and even reptiles and amphibians too suffered greatly at the hands of man over the last few centuries. There is one region of the reserve dedicated solely to the exhibition and education concerning these poor creatures to whom we ourselves are to blame for the loss of. Found there are both naturally extinct creatures and extant ones that, without drastic changes soon, are bound to follow them into oblivion. A special exhibition designed with utmost intention to spread awareness, awe and entertainment take a backseat here for reflection and education.

The Hall of Humanity is one of Eden's smaller exhibition complexes, and one of its remaining originals. As you come down a small wooded trail to the extreme northwest of the park, you'll find no safari vans and no freely-roaming dinosaurs - or, excluding birds, no dinosaurs at all - in this sector of the park. The enclosures are spacious and naturalistic, but simplistic, reminiscent of the better zoos of the early 21st century, notable for their use of obvious and unhidden plexiglass and concrete barriers and designed with an intentional nostalgia of the days gone by. It is here, in these wooded and secluded enclosures, that all of history's prematurely-terminated lines of life have been restored, a second chance at life, the least we - the sole reason for the loss of their lines in the first place - could do. A walkthrough aviary, the wires overgrown with morning glories and clematis, houses a group of plump and inquisitive birds - The Ubiquitous Dodo, Rodrigues Solitaires, Kagu, Kakapo parrot and Tasmanian Emu, all creatures lost to time or nearly so in the wild. Their innate lack of fear is obvious here as they run up to patrons for handfuls of seeds and grain, knowing nothing of their own sad histories and the tales of their ancestors exterminated in cold blood.

Another enclosure, lush with blooming wildflowers and rolling hills, houses a Quagga, the only specimen so far imported into the country. Differing from most of Eden's other creatures, she - a 3 year old mare called Ms. Heather - is not the result of cloning at all but rather the end result of a century-long selective breeding effort to restore a superficial imitation of her breed from the common Plain's zebra. Bred in South Africa, where several dozen more like her reside, the gentle creature houses for companionship currently with a small group of Przewalski's horses, a wild breed once endangered but now a rare success story, with introduced populations roaming freely throughout their ancestral Mongolia and gracing zoological parks the world wide. Not far down the path splits in two, with one sector heading uphill to find a number of coastal oceanic enclosures housing seals and various sea birds, most notably the Great Auk, the original penguin, which Eden exhibited ten years before any other zoo in the southern hemisphere. The second path leads into a clearing towards another pasture home to a group of Saigas, among the last populations on Earth and the only lasting captive breeding group so far established, whom live alongside the yards of three magnificent carnivores - a pair of Asiatic cheetahs, the only known pair in captivity of a species now believed extinct in the wild - and most tragically, two brothers - and then large wooded yards home to Eden's famous clan of Thylacines and pack of Warrahs. Of all of the many animals which call the Hall home, it is probably these two, the two southernmost great land predators, that are best-known and most appreciated, and this can probably be attributed to Eden's second and probably most highly publicized odd-couple arrangement, a match separated over 100 million years of evolution that was brought together through chance convergence of form and a most coincidental scenario.

The Tale of the Tiger and the Wolf

The Warrah, or Falklands Island Wolf, was a small dog-like carnivore once native to the far southern Falkland Islands off South America, closely allied to the maned wolf, the only large carnivore of a small and isolated island otherwise home only to sea birds. It was a sleek and supple animal, low to the ground and with a rich reddish and white pelt prized by humans. Isolated from all other large animals for millions of years, by the time man had found them, they had lost any natural fear of him they might have once possessed, running to them and taking food from their fingers. Their complete naive trust was highly exploited and left them extremely vulnerable, with the canines being so tame and fearless as to run up to settlers holding tidbits of meet and allow themselves to be caught and killed by hand. Poisoned for fear the predators would go after the sheep and livestock upon which their livelihood depended, less than two centuries amassed between its first account and its complete extermination.

The Thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger, was the largest marsupial carnivore of the modern age and one which, despite being out-competed on mainland Australia by introduced wild dogs thousands of years earlier, survived all the way up into the early 20th century on isolated Tasmania, late enough that a small number of black and white photography and even film was made of the species in the brief years between its discovery by European settlers and its extinction in 1936. Despite a closer relationship to Tasmanian devils and numbats and eons of divergence from even the most primitive placental mammal, the resemblance of the 'tiger' - so named for the bold stripes down its lower back - to a canine was remarkably complete, expressed not only in the animal's digitigrade posture and the shape of its skull, but even in the care of its young, which once too large for permanent housing in the pouch were reared in dens and fed on regurgitated remains of the mother's kills. Exactly like the Warrah, the reason for the thylacine's extermination was due to a perceived fear of its predation of sheep. The last wild specimen was shot in 1930, with zoo specimens surviving another 6 years before the last known animal, a caged male named Benjamin, was neglectfully locked out of his indoor housing during a severe winter storm and died of exposure, ending the line, in perhaps the most pitiful way possible, of one of the Holocene's most unique and magnificent creatures... in its natural state, at least.

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The Thylacine was first successfully cloned in 2056 and by United States geneticists, utilizing genetic material preserved from a single pair of animals that lived and died over 150 years ago at the national Zoo in Washington DC, in the United States - a mother and a male offspring, to worldwide acclaim - while Eden worked on their groundbreaking genetic science in secret, the rest of the world cheered as such an iconic creature had been restored to life, unbeknownst to them the far greater achievements soon to be unveiled.

The first animal, named Samson, lived a normal and healthy lifespan of nine years, but was never bred, for it wouldn't be for 14 years that another clone could be brought to term, a problem exacerbated by the increasing lack of useable surrogates as the Tasmanian devil, the tiger's only living relative, continued to decline. With the widespread availability of artificial wombs during the 2090's a number of Thylacine specimens were finally produced around the turn of the century, but with the unfortunate side-affect of leaving the entire captive population more or less as closely related as siblings. Due to the extreme closeness genetically of all living specimens to one another and a lack of new blood in the gene pool, which was only being exacerbated by further attempts at inbreeding, thylacines have historically been very difficult and highly expensive to obtain, with prices of upwards $500,000 USD per cub. Since their restoration, they have only ever been housed at ten zoos worldwide, 2 of these being in the United States, three in Australia (including at Eden), and five being across western Europe. Of these, only four zoos still hold the species today - London Zoo, Eden Paleo-Zoological Park, Copenhagen, and San Diego, with the animal no longer exhibited anywhere else in Australia, despite its native status, following the death of Melbourne's last male last autumn. Eden, despite having paid no assistance in the struggles to restore the animal overseas despite definite ability to have, was nevertheless quick to stock up on the animals as they became available, buying ten specimens the first year they became available with hopes of monopolizing the market for itself. Five of the ten animals remain at the park today, having well outlived expected lifespans, and Eden has since imported a number of others sourced from the rare successful breedings in other zoos worldwide. In total, the park has produced almost a dozen healthy young of the species, most successfully in the last few years, though the majority of them required hand-rearing to survive as young, either born prematurely or ill or simply neglected by their parents.

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Five years ago at Eden, however, one animal broke this trend. A young female Thylacine named Sarabi - a recent import from London and no more than two years old - was found to be pregnant. Concern was immediately evident because of her young age and overall history of poor survival of young in the species, but the animal's pregnancy came full term, she birthed four young, and all seemed well as the joeys latched on and began to feed. Indeed for almost two months the young grew, appearing healthy and in good form at all intervals when checked, a process made easy by Sarabi's very gentle and tolerant nature as a hand-raised animal - like most captive thylacines in the modern era, Sarabi was born weak and sickly, in need of supplementary care to thrive. This was not atypical at all for the species, and that Sarabi was caring for her pups and that they all seemed in good form was viewed as groundbreaking, for until then pregnancy was rare and almost all cubs born of natural means - less than a dozen in total - had died young or required extensive assistance to survive. Things seemed to be working out wonderfully until one day roughly 45 days after giving birth, Sarabi fell deathly ill and passed away within days of a severe viral infection believed to have come from tainted feed. Three of her four cubs, at the time a little smaller than squirrels and just barely furred, died after only a day under artificial care. Desperate to save the remaining cub, the risky decision was made to try and place her with a foster mother. A search was made for a lactacting domestic dog, but only one was available at the time, and it was not quite ideal - one of the park's warrahs - a creature restored by the corporation without public statement earlier than even the thylacine - had just two days before given birth to a litter of three cubs, one of which was still-born. The mother warrah was exceptionally tame, not only coming from a naturally-so species but also highly socialized as a cub, and often served as an animal ambassador, walked about the park by keepers with her mate on leash, little different than a rather aloof dog in her demeanor - but she was far from a dog and great concerns were to be had she might simply kill the cub as an intruder if put with it. Only hours after her last sibling passed, however, the little tiger cub began to weaken, and in a last ditch attempt to save her was slipped into the mother wolf's den and nestled amongst her pups to hide her smell. Staff then held their breath as the mother was allowed to return to her young - and promptly laid down, sniffed her new pup, and allowed the three babies to suckle. The cub miraculously survived the first night, and another, and soon began to grow. The transfer seemed a success.

Not all was perfect with the arrangement - the young thylacine, for example, was much more clingy than a warrah pup and much less obliged to let go of the nipple when mealtime was finished - but it worked. The cub grew, more slowly than her siblings, but to an overall larger size. Denied the natural pacification of a nipple to suckle at all times, the young pup took to suckling her sibling's tails and ears. Denied a pouch to rest in, she huddled beneath her mother's bushy tail, crawling in circles to hide in it as it moved about, earning her the lasting nickname of "Dizzy". As she grew, Dizzy took to her family's habits and learned to play with her foster brother and sister just as they did, romping and play-biting in the grass. She accepted her first tidbits of adult food in the same manner, by licking her foster mother's lips to solicit regurgitation. For eighteen months Dizzy lived a life as a warrah amongst eight other warrahs, including her parents and siblings. She never once attempted to harm them and even nuzzled them affectionately, though she never became as attached as the wolves were to one another, being less social by nature. One and a half years after her birth, Dizzy was re-integrated into the thylacine clan in hopes of joining the breeding pool in another year or two. Success was had when Dizzy gave birth to her own litter of two cubs the following spring and raised and weaned them to maturity without assistance and without complication, bringing the total number of Thylacines in Eden's care - some kept off exhibit and others rotated between enclosures - as of 2115 to a remarkable 16. Their enclosures becoming crowded, plans are in progress to begin leasing some specimens to other high-end parks on mainland Australia starting next year.

Both the Thylacine and the Warrah are relatively easy to keep zoo specimens, eating basic carnivore diets and neither being particularly aggressive at all if socialized. Warrahs are quite tame by nature, though unaltered males become testy during the spring and autumn breeding seasons, and though they're large, thylacines are remarkably docile and have never been recorded inflicting severe injury on a human being. Their jaws are in fact very weak for their size and in nature it's unlikely they would have pursued prey much larger than twenty pounds, apparently being specialist hunters of rabbit-sized animals captured by an an ambush-based hunting manner followed by a brief rapid sprint.