Bones and all: see how the diets of Tasmanian devils can wear down their sharp teeth to blunt nubbins

Zoos Victoria, Author provided

Tahlia Pollock, Monash University; Alistair Evans, Monash University; David Hocking, Monash University, and Marissa Parrott, The University of MelbourneTasmanian devils are expert scavengers, with strong jaws and robust teeth that give them the notorious ability to eat almost all of a carcass — bones and all.
Scientists have even found echidna spikes in their poo.

But regularly crunching through bone comes at a cost: extreme tooth wear. In our new study, we analysed the skulls of nearly 300 devils, and show how regularly crunching through bones wears a devil’s teeth down from sharp-edged weapons to blunt nubbins.

Tasmanian devils are endangered and their wild population is continuing to decline. A key part of conserving this marsupial is by maintaining healthy and happy devils in captivity.

Understanding how their food affects their teeth can help us see if captive devils have the same types of tooth wear as their wild counterparts, and look for signs of any unusual or harmful wear.

Is there anything a devil won’t eat?

Tasmanian devils are the largest marsupial carnivore alive today. As scavengers, they occupy a unique niche in the Australian ecosystem by disposing of dead animal carcasses.

Captive Tasmanian devils are given a variety of foods to replicate what they’d find in the wild. This photo was taken during a carcass feed at Healesville Sanctuary.
Zoos Victoria, Author provided

Devils are highly opportunistic and can eat many different types of prey. While their favourites are the carcasses of native mammals such as wombats and wallabies, they’ll also eat reptiles, amphibians, birds, fish, and even insects.

We know this because we find hair, feathers, scales, small bones, claws and more in their poo.

Almost nothing is off limits to devils — they’ll even have a go at a stranded whale given the chance. Although devils prefer to scavenge, they’re also accomplished hunters.

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But due to a transmissible cancer, devil facial tumour disease, wild numbers of these remarkable marsupials have plummeted by around 80%.

Right now, 45 Australian zoos and wildlife sanctuaries, plus an island and a fenced peninsula, are collaborating to maintain a healthy population of disease-free devils. It’s important for these institutions to provide captive animals with the right kinds of food for their health and to help make their future release back to disease-free wild locations successful.

Devils naturally wear their teeth down from sharp points and edges to blunt, almost flat surfaces by regularly eating bones.
Tahlia Pollock, Author provided

This is especially crucial for carnivores, who rely on tough foods to help them develop strong jaws.

Like hyaenas, but stronger

The types of food an animal eats will wear their teeth down differently. For example, big cats such as lions prefer to eat the softer parts of a carcass, like flesh or organs, and leave the bones behind.

Spotted hyaenas, however, will happily eat the bones. As a result, hyaenas have incredibly high tooth wear compared with lions.

This might not hinder the hyaena or devil as much as you might think. Both have very strong jaws that can compensate for the loss of sharp teeth. In fact, devils have the strongest bite force per body weight of any living mammal.

In the interactive below, you can check out 3D models of devil skulls to get a better idea of how much their teeth wear down.

Toothwear in Tasmanian Devils by Evans EvoMorph Lab on Sketchfab

Comparing wild and captive diets

By comparing the tooth wear of wild and captive devils, we can see if captive animals are encountering enough hard foods in their diets.

In the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program — an initiative of the federal and Tasmanian governments — captive devils are given a variety of small and large foods at different times, replicating what they’d find in the wild.

We found no signs of different or harmful tooth wear in captive devils, and they showed much the same patterns and types of wear as wild devils.

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However, we noticed captive devils wore their teeth more slowly than those in the wild. This may be due to eating higher quality food, such as carcasses that were fresh, whole, and yet to be scavenged.

This means captive institutions are doing a good job of providing devils with the right types of food for their teeth and encouraging wild behaviours.

Part of the health check for wild devils involves looking at their teeth. This particular devil has nice sharp tips and edges on their canines and molars.
Marissa Parrott/Zoos Victoria, Author provided

Collecting data about Tassie devils after they’ve been released confirms this. In 2012 and 2013, devils were released onto Maria Island in Tasmania after being born and raised for around a year in captivity.

Encouragingly, these devils kept the behaviours required to scavenge and hunt prey, and had diets similar to wild devils.

How you can help save Tasmanian devils

Our research is one small, but promising, piece in the overall puzzle. While captive research and breeding programs help conserve the Tasmanian devil, there are ways you can help, too.

Because they like to scavenge the carcasses of dead animals, road kill is especially tempting for devils. But being so close to the road is dangerous and road mortality is the second-biggest killer of wild devils.

So take care on the roads to help wildlife, especially if driving at night. And if you’re in Tasmania and see a devil that’s been hit on the road, log it in the Roadkill TAS app.

This will help identify road kill hotspots and protect this impressive, but endangered, species.

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Tahlia Pollock, PhD candidate, Monash University; Alistair Evans, Associate Professor, Monash University; David Hocking, Curator of Vertebrate Zoology and Palaeontology at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) | Adjunct Research Associate at Monash University, Monash University, and Marissa Parrott, Reproductive Biologist, Wildlife Conservation & Science, Zoos Victoria, and Honorary Research Associate, BioSciences, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The lengthy childhood of endangered orangutans is written in their teeth

A young Bornean orangutan nursing.
Erin Vogel, Author provided

Tanya M. Smith, Griffith University

Orangutan populations in the wild are critically endangered, and one of the things that may hamper their survival is the time they take to rear new offspring.

An orangutan mother will not give birth again until she’s finished providing milk to her previous offspring. Nursing can take a long time and vary across seasons, as we found in research published today in Science Advances.

Primate mothers, including humans, raise only a few slow-growing offspring during their reproductive years.

Differences in infant development have a profound effect on how many children a female can have over the course of her life – the key marker of success from an evolutionary vantage point.

Great apes have a high-stakes strategy. Chimpanzee mothers nurse their offspring for five years on average, twice as long as humans in traditional small-scaled societies.

Orangutans have been suspected of having even longer periods of infant dependency, although determining just how long has been a particular challenge for field biologists.

Wild orangutan from Gunung Palung National Park, Borneo, Indonesia with her one month old infant. (Gunung Palung Orangutan Project)

Living high up in dwindling Southeast Asian forests, these apes are adept at evading observers. Their nursing behaviour is often concealed, particularly while juveniles cling to their mother or rest together in night nests.

Maintaining continuous field studies to track their development is expensive, and efforts are hindered by frequent forest fires and devastating deforestation for palm oil plantations.

Teeth tell the story

I have spent the past few decades studying how orangutans and other primates form their teeth. Amazingly, every day of childhood is captured during tooth formation, a record that begins before birth and lasts for millions of years.

Teeth also contain detailed dietary, health and behavioural histories, allowing biological anthropologists an unprecedented window into the human past.

I’ve also teamed up with researchers Manish Arora and Christine Austin, at Icahn School of Medicine at Mt Sinai in New York, who have pioneered methods to map the fine-scaled elemental composition of teeth, as well as primate lactation expert Katie Hinde at Arizona State University.

We have shown in a previous study that tiny amounts of the element barium are an accurate marker of mother’s milk consumption. Like calcium, barium is sourced from the mother’s skeleton, concentrated in milk, and ultimately written into the bones and teeth of her offspring.

Tooth growth creates daily lines (indicated by short white lines), as well as a neonatal line (NL) at birth. Growth starts at the junction between enamel and dentine, and progresses away from the junction and towards the root (arrows).
Christine Austin and Tanya Smith

Once animals start nursing after birth, their teeth show increases in barium values, which begin to decrease when solid food is added to the diet. These values drop further to pre-birth levels when primates stop nursing and are weaned.

We’ve recently used this approach to explore the nursing histories of wild orangutans in collaboration with orangutan expert Erin Vogel at Rutgers University. In order to do so, I borrowed teeth housed in natural history museums from individuals that had been shot many years ago during collection expeditions.

Wild Bornean orangutan mother and suckling 19-month old infant.
Paige Prentice, Author provided

Orangutan teeth show a gradual increase in barium values from birth through their first year of life, a time of increasing consumption of their mother’s milk. After 12-18 months, values decrease as infants begin eating solid foods consistently.

But surprisingly, barium levels then begin to fluctuate on an approximately annual basis. We suspect that this is due to seasonal changes in food availability. When fruit is in short supply, infants appear to rely more on their mother’s milk to meet their nutritional needs.

Light microscope image (left) of a wild orangutan molar contrasted with an elemental map of the same tooth (right) showing the distribution of barium. The timing of barium incorporation was determined from accentuated lines (in days of age on the left), which form during enamel and dentine secretion. Approximately annual bands of enriched barium are apparent in the dentine after the first year, likely due to seasonal increases in mother’s milk intake.
Smith et al. (2017) Science Advances

Hanging around

Another surprising finding is that nursing may continue for more than eight years, longer than any other wild animal.

This information is the first of its kind for wild Sumatran orangutans, as they have been especially difficult to study in their native habitat. Previous estimates from two wild Bornean orangutans suggested that juveniles nurse until about six to eight years of age.

Rather than spending so much time and energy breastfeeding their children, human mothers in traditional societies transition their infants onto soft weaning foods around six months of age, tapering them off milk a few years later.

Humans also benefit from having help such as older siblings and grandparents who lend a hand with childcare and enable women to energetically prepare for having their next child.

Orangutan mothers have it hard by comparison. They live alone in unpredictable environments with limited nutritional resources. In order to survive they use less energy than other great apes, raising their young more slowly.

Wild orangutan mother and 11-month old infant.
Tim Laman, Author provided

Vulnerable orangutans

Female orangutans begin reproducing around age 15 and can live until 50 years old in the most favourable of circumstances. They bear new offspring every six to nine years, producing no more than six or seven descendents over their lifetime.

Having a long nursing period and slow maturation makes orangutan populations especially vulnerable to environmental perturbations.

Recent work has also implicated poor habitat quality and the pet trade as additional factors in their rapidly declining numbers, which is underscored by their critically endangered status.

Research on collections housed in natural history museums provides timely evidence of how remarkable orangutans are, how much information we can retrieve from their teeth, and why conservation efforts informed by evolutionary biology are critical.

Tanya M. Smith, Associate Professor in the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.