Hi there guys my name is Katie and I'm one of the Australian fauna keepers here at Perth Zoo and I'm going to be telling you a little bit about our Tasmanian devils.
So we have two adult female Devils here at Perth Zoo and they're around about five years of age. We have Laura and Lulu. Now Tasmanian devils are the world's largest carnivorous marsupial so what that means is that they're meat eaters as you've seen from our footage but they also have a pouch so similar to the kangaroos and the koalas. This is where their babies are going to grow and develop.
Now pregnancy or gestation for the Tasmanian Devil is very short. Most marsupials are only pregnant for about three or four weeks and when the babies are born they're extremely small. Tasmanian Devil babies are about the size of a grain of rice and they have to make their way up into the pouch and attached to one of mums four teats. Now they actually stay in the pouch for about four months before they are nested in a burrow where they're kept nice and safe with mum for a while.
Now they're actually a solitary species though, so shortly after that they'll go out on their own and make their own way in the big wide world. Now they only really come together when they are feeding off a carcass so Tasmanian Devils, as I said before, are carnivorous marsupials and most of the food that they're eating are already dead. So Tassie Devils aren't great hunters they'll feed on things like possums maybe kangaroos if they're lucky enough they'll find a big juicy wombat. They're going to devour as much as they possibly can and Tassie Devils can even eat 40% of their body weight in a very short period of time. To do this they've got extremely powerful jaws almost three times stronger than a dog of a similar size and they have 42 razor-sharp teeth so they're going to be eating absolutely everything.
Just over 20 years ago a disease emerged called the Devil Facial Tumour Disease. Now unfortunately this disease is actually threatening the Tasmanian devils to extinction and they're currently an endangered species. So the disease is a transmittable cancer which is quite unusual and devils when they feed together they can have very little table manners so they like to shout and they like to bite each other. And that's how this disease is transmitted. Currently, unfortunately, there's no cure or no vaccination yet but we have a really great insurance population. Now what this means is that we've got lots of really healthy Devils really great genetics in zoos and wildlife parks around Australia and we also have isolated areas for example Murat's Island in which these devils lead a nice wild life.
So our two devils have very different personalities. Lulu, who we can see who's almost completely black, is very shy. She's very cautious and she's a very quiet devil and Laura, who has the white straps across her back, she is much more bold and much more boisterous, so it's generally her that will get to the carcass feed beforehand