People are reporting sightings of the Tasmanian tiger, thought to be extinct | Hacker News Reader

People are reporting sightings of the Tasmanian tiger, thought to be extinct

cnn.com

115 pointsshawndumas57 comments

There have been reported sightings my whole life ever since I can remember, and I was born here in Australia in the 1980s.

While I don't think it's impossible, I'm not sure what's new here except the fact that almost everyone now carries a camera yet we're still to get clear images ;)

In fairness, it's nocturnal and probably buggers off quickly when it spots you.

But I'm biased, I'm a moose believer (or as I like to call it, a moother) based on the circumstantial evidence, but a lot of people are skeptical a creature as large as a moose could keep a low profile that long.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/103196185/new-zealands-moos...

Hah, that moose one is new to me. We have a history of some big cat sightings here around Sydney and NSW. The usual story is some US military people brought it (them?) for some reason and it escaped, I think. Though there are many stories and explanations as you'd expect.

Well, we definitely know that they were there, released in the hey-day of Acclimatisation Societies, but the last proof of them was in the 1950s.

The fact that no-one saw them while helicopters were beating the bush during the goldrush red deer helicopter hunting years counts against them, but my pet theory is that moose love water, and there's plenty of swamps in Fiordland (if there's a flat bit, it's probably a swamp) to hide from helicopters in.

Personal story, the first I ever heard of big cats living in the Grampians, Victoria was after coming back from a lone morning hike up Boronia Peak overlooking Halls Gap. I would have been around 14 at the time and told some of the adults back at the campsite that I found really big cat paw prints on the bank of a creek.

Similar story of US Airmen releasing their mascot pumas into the wild.

Rural WA'ian here. There's plenty of rumours of a "panther" around Nannup; no US Airmen story, it was just a really big black feral cat the size of a panther.

From what I've seen personally, feral gets can get BIG. Like mastiff-sized. So I tend to believe these rumours but take their origins with various grains of salt.

The origin stories should be taken with a grain of salt, but that we have cougar-sized ferals is well recorded. There was a Gippsland feral killed and DNA tested that was half as big again as a record-sized domestic cat.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2005-11-28/tests-reveal-super-si...

New Zealand. Home to all sorts of weird-ass birds and bugs, but moose are considered cryptids there.

I love how big the world is sometimes.

It's upside-down in more ways than one, apparently.

We even have our own Sasquatch. A fun game is telling foreign hikers in our backcountry huts that the terrifying noises they're hearing at night is a Maero[1]. They're actually from an unwanted Australian overstayer, the brushtail possum[2], but cannibalistic wild men is a lot more fun.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maero

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70n88xAdmo0

A mere moose pales in comparison to the legendary CANTERBURY PANTHER

Do you not have hunters in NZ? In the US any actual cryptid would be caught on someone's trail cam, eventually.

There is plenty of hunters in NZ, there is even a wikipedia page on hunting in NZ I just discovered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunting_in_New_Zealand

And TV, Hunting Aotearoa: https://www.maoritelevision.com/shows/hunting-aotearoa

Great stuff, in a mix of Māori and laid back NZ English.

Yep, I hunt myself, mainly red deer and fallow, with the occasional chamois/pig/wallaby/rabbit/hare as I go.

Plenty of hunters, but moose were released in the most difficult terrain in NZ - Fiordland.

> I'm not sure what's new here except the fact that almost everyone now carries a camera yet we're still to get clear images ;)

Exactly this. The absence of clear photographs has much more negative predictive value now that almost everyone is carrying a cell phone with a camera almost all the time they are away from home.

Species like this seem to have some kind of focus-deflecting abilities so that photographs always turn out blurry and indistinguishable from a large feral cat.

They weren't silent animals either, and were fond of raiding sheep, chickens etc., from farms (the reason they were exterminated). It doesn't seem plausible to me that they'd survive with such a low profile for circa 90 years.

A plausible reason for why they would survive with such a low profile is that they faced a strong selection pressure to do so as the more bold tigers were hunted leaving only the subtle ones to reproduce.

Not that I disagree with you, and I don't know about others, but I've seen lots of cool one time things I've never taken pictures of because I'm too busy watching it and honestly never think to take pictures until after.

Animals are also hard to take pictures of. I've been trying to get a good picture of a squirrel from my yard for a friend of mine for weeks now but the little bastards are quick. By the time I get the camera app open they're gone.

At times I've seen people reach for their phone and start recording even when their safety is at risk. Similarly if you're at an event the features something like a jet fighter flyby you can look around and see more people taking pictures than actually watching for themselves.

I have no idea what these people are thinking and like you would prefer to actually experience it myself, but I'd expect at least one of them to have reached for their phone before they even realized what they were recording.

There's also been dedicated people heading out with night vision cameras, they've found nothing either.

See also the UK's Beast of Bodmin Moor, the Fen Tiger etc. etc. etc., still evading the ubiquitous gaze of the camera phone after all these years, a couple of blury images of obvious domestic cats notwithstanding.

Surely it must be that the feline predator looming deep in the human psyche is what lies beneath these apparitions.

Yep, it pops up in news every few years.

Like the Loch Ness monster, but ore likely to be real.

(Which is not saying much!)

If they still existed we would find evidence in the form of carcasses, bones, poo or kills. I would love it if they did still exist though.

Wouldn't be sure about the carcasses, bones, and kills, not when they share(d) an island with another carnivore that is a very effective and enthusiastic scavenger:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmanian_devil > Tasmanian devils can eliminate all traces of a carcass of a smaller animal, devouring the bones and fur if desired.

The poo one is interesting - no matter how hard I google, I can't find an image of thylacine shit, so not sure how you'd differentiate it from other animals' scat.

We would have to assume that every single carcass, including all the bones was completely removed by the devils for that to be true. No roadkills being found etc. And there are a lot of roadkills in Australia. Poo is used to identify species via DNA analysis: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3783732?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con... https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article/96/6/688/2187659

A skittish nocturnal animal is unlikely to get roadkilled. Only the carcasses we'd find need to get removed promptly by scavengers. That said, I think it's more likely extinct than not.

>Localised populations of devils have also been severely reduced by collisions with motor vehicles, particularly when they are eating roadkill.

>They are also found near roads where roadkill is prevalent, although the devils themselves are often killed by vehicles while retrieving the carrion.

From the Tasmanian Devil wiki page.

There are many rare species which we do know exist that even trained wildlife biologists struggle to capture on camera. Not saying I think they are still around, but I wouldn’t take the lack of a photo in the smartphone era to be evidence of much (yet).

I'm not sure what's new here except the fact that almost everyone now carries a camera yet we're still to get clear images ;)

Considering the quality of the average person's pictures, I don't think the proliferation of cameraphones will help us get clear picture.

Pictures, yes. Pictures of blurry, smeary things in the corner of the frame. But clear, well-framed pictures are beyond the capability of 95% of the public.

Same for me, I've been hearing these stories my whole life.

See also the regular "Big Cat" sightings in the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/apr/14/britains-big-...

I remember driving through the mountains of Tasmania about 20 years ago - some backwater road towards Zeehan if memory serves me correctly. I recall looking in my rear view mirror during one stretch and seeing a yellow/tan coloured dog like creature crossing the road a few hundred metres behind the car.

I couldn't see any stripes clearly in the 2 seconds in was in the mirror. I dismissed it as a dog because (a) it was daylight and Thylacine's are purported to be nocturnal (b) it was near reasonably trafficked road and they are known to be shy and (c) I don't think the population of the Tassie Tiger was very strong in the North Western part of the island where I was.

But what if?? <thinking face emoji>

I live in Tasmania, about 3km from the nearest Apple store ;)

You’d think the most obvious sign of a living Thylacine would be poop.

Poop isn’t nocturnal and doesn’t run away when spotted.

Is there anyone who claims to have found Tassie Tiger poop?

"One report last February said that two people, visiting Tasmania from Australia,"

...from "mainland" Australia perhaps.

"newly released Australian government documents"

...aren't from the federal government, but from the Tasmanian state government.

These "detailed" sightings are almost universally worthless.

> One report last February said that two people, visiting Tasmania from Australia,

Haha, Tasmania is a state of Australia and they are a little sensitive about slips of the tongue implying Australia is a separate place to them.

Someday, when every man, woman, and child carries a camera, we will get a picture of this illusive creature. Someday.

People also report sightings of bigfoot, aliens, ghosts. I'd love for them to not be extinct but reported sightings aren't even close to enough to go off of.

I'm surprised that they don't try to set up few dozens photo-traps in the area, in Europe it works quite well for proving re-emergence of wolves in areas where they were not seen for hundred years.

They have. Here's the best result so far:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-06/tasmanian-tiger-sight...

It's not exactly convincing.

Ok, but what else could it be?

Anything. A quoll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoll

Or a feral cat: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-15/feral-cat-caught-on-c...

Feral cats are capable of killing pademelons: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-30/scientists-catch-a-fe...

And feral cats can grow to be quite large and feisty: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-07/truckie-saves-pet-fer...

There have long been reported sightings of the Tasmanian tiger, and they're mostly not very credible.

The New Yorker had an outstanding article about the small group of people who think it might have survived: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/02/the-obsessive-...

They're sort of like big foot hunters, except the animal they're looking for used to exist.

People have been reporting sightings for decades - almost since the last known one died.

Similar for Moas in NZ.

Or Bigfoot, Loch Ness monster.

Hearsay of sightings should not be news. Quality video evidence is the only thing that should get to a news site.

That's a very good movie. It's based on a superb novel [1] by the Australian writer and director Julia Leigh. The film captures the quiet, minimalist style of the book really well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunter_(Leigh_novel)

Not interesting until the frequency of 'spotting dog looking like a Tasmanian tiger' is estimated, and compared with the frequency of current 'tiger' sightings. Otherwise, what's being talked about?

I really wish articles like this weren't published since they're basically a call for poachers.

Is always reported but never caught

This is very exciting news. The Coelacanth was also extinct - for several hundred million years - until it wasn't.

Maybe Tasmanian tiger this year and Mokele-mbembe next year? Not impossible. Though unlikely.

Local fishermen caught coelacanth all the time, they had no idea that university-educated foreigners considered it to be extinct.

The New Caledonian crested gecko was thought to be extinct for over 100 years until they were rediscovered in 1994. Now they're common place in the pet trade because they're so hardy.

Rediscovery of "extinct" species is common place, because of the inherent difficulty in proving that all individuals of a given species are dead. Combine this with the robustness of biology, allowing species to quickly boom under favorable conditions, and then false extinction ends up happening more often than you would probably suspect. It's normal for many healthy populations to fluctuate wildly around a given carrying capacity. r-selected organisms are particularly notorious for having like 95% of the population die off regularly, and then bouncing back in a few years.

In the case of the thylacine, it's a macro organism so it probably has a higher profile when compared to a small gecko. So the likelihood that they're still extant probably isn't quite as high, unfortunately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crested_gecko

Could be dogs or foxes easily also

"Life will find a way"

"Life ... ummm, finds a way"

Pics or it didn't happen.

No bones, no story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com