A Tasmanian devil named Mary successfully eluded searchers equipped with a thermal-imaging drone for a third day after escaping from an Australian wildlife park.<\/p>\n
Keepers discovered the furry, carnivorous marsupial was missing from her enclosure at Paradise Country wildlife park on Queensland’s Gold Coast on Tuesday morning.<\/p>\n
A dozen wildlife experts backed by a sniffer dog and a thermal-imaging drone operator searched through two nights for the critter, park officials said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“Our priority remains on relocating Mary to ensure her welfare, and we will continue to search today and into this evening,” it said.<\/p>\n
CCTV images released to the public showed Mary running into the distance of the wildlife park’s grounds at night, several hours before her disappearance was noticed.<\/p>\n
Tasmanian devils – agile, mostly nocturnal animals that can roam for 16km in a single night – have been extinct on the Australian mainland for more than 3,000 years.<\/p>\n
The marsupials can live up to six years in the wild, with males weighing as much as 14kg and standing 30cm tall at the shoulder, according to Tasmania’s environment department.<\/p>\n
Mary is relatively young at two years old, however, and “extremely shy”, said the wildlife park’s curator, Lauren Mousley.<\/p>\n
“Generally around this age they can be a little bit more adventurous, but finding that she is the one that headed out is very, very abnormal given her demeanour,” she said in a video update after the breakout.<\/p>\n
Though widespread on the island state of Tasmania, the marsupials are listed as endangered and face a significant threat from a rare, transmissible cancer known as Devil Facial Tumour Disease.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Tasmanian devil named Mary successfully eluded searchers equipped with a thermal-imaging drone for a third day after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":482352,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":["post-482351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482351\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}