Tasmanian Devils To Be Listed as 'Endangered'

Taz is on his last legs. Tasmanian devils' numbers have been dwindling fast as a result of a nasty infectious cancer that spreads among these strange marsupial mammals.

Now, the Australian government (the island of Tasmania, where the devils live, is part of Australia) has decided to list Tasmanian devils as endangered. Previously they were just listed as vulnerable. The population has dropped by 70 percent since 1996 when the disease was first officially reported, according to the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.

The Australian government is spending $10 million over five years to try and save Taz.

Extinction, ironically, is part of life. Some experts say that 99 percent of all species that ever lived on Earth are now extinct. Many of those extinctions occurred during one of Earth's five major extinction events, including the most recent one — the K-T extinction that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs.

Whether Taz goes extinct or not, some experts say Earth now is undergoing a sixth extinction event, as a result of human impacts on habitats, that will wipe out as species to the same extent as the previous extinction events. There are dissenters who are unsure and say it's hard to know when some animals are extinct because they are hard to sight — like birds or frogs or life that we haven't even categorized or named yet.

However, with Taz, he lives in only one place on Earth and he's easy to spot. It's clear that he's at huge risk, but there is some hope with the government attention and the fact that a few devils have been found to have resistance to the disease.