Believe it or not, contagious forms of cancer exist, and while they are rare, scientists have found that one unfortunate creature is being threatened by not just one, but two different forms of these diseases, a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Science study has revealed.
The creature in question is the Tasmanian devil—a carnivorous marsupial found in the Australian island state from which it takes its name. Experts already knew that the fierce, dog-sized animals were susceptible to a type of transmissible cancer that can cause facial tumors, but the new study found a second form of contagious cancer that affects them as well.
Facial tumors were first discovered on Tasmanian devils in 1996, according to the University of Cambridge, when scientists found them around the mouth of marsupials in the northeastern part of the island. Shortly thereafter, they found that the cancer could be spread from one creature to another through biting—killing the infected within months of the first signs of symptoms.
Since then, the disease has spread throughout much of Tasmania, causing massive declines in the devil populations and forcing them the International Union for Conservation of Nature to declare them an endangered species in 2008. To date, transmissible cancer has only been detected in two other types of creatures: dogs and soft-shell clams.
Findings suggest transmissible cancer may not be so rare after all
Unfortunately for the Tasmanian devils, lightning has apparently struck twice, as scientists from Cambridge and the University of Tasmania has identified a second type of contagious cancer that is genetically distinct but visibly indistinguishable from the previously discovered form.
According to first author Dr. Ruth Pye from the University of Tasmania’s Menzies Institute for Medical Research, the disease has been detected in eight devils in southeastern Tasmania thus to date, and co-senior author Dr. Elizabeth Murchison of the Department of Veterinary Medicine at Cambridge added that the discovery has them second-guessing the rarity of contagious cancer.
“Previously, we thought that Tasmanian devils were extremely unlucky to have fallen victim to a single runaway cancer that emerged from one individual devil and spread through the devil population by biting,” Dr. Murchison explained in a statement. “However, now that we have discovered that this has happened a second time, it makes us wonder if Tasmanian devils might be particularly vulnerable to developing this type of disease, or that transmissible cancers may not be as rare in nature as we previously thought.”
“It’s possible that in the Tasmanian wilderness there are more transmissible cancers in Tasmanian devils that have not yet been discovered. The potential for new transmissible cancers to emerge in this species has important implications for Tasmanian devil conservation programs,” added co-senior Professor Gregory Woods, also from the Menzies Institute.
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