One thought on “Elizabeth Murchison: Fighting a contagious cancer”

1. I skimmed an article in Scientific American about this a couple of years ago. The updated map of the spread is alarming.

   A last-ditch effort might be to keep some Devils in zoos around the world and, if no other solution is found, wait until the last ones in the wild are dead, and reintroduce ones from zoos. That might be a long time, and to be worthwhile one would have to make sure the reintroduced ones don’t get reinfected by dead ones they find. 2x the lifetime of a Devil? But what happens to the ecosystem in that time? It will be another opportunity to study the effect of a keystone species disappearing and reappearing.

   What would happen if we did not intervene? If they all died, it would be a “natural” extinction.

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