Uncertain Hope Blooms for Tasmanian Devils

On a misty summer morning in 2015, Manuel Ruiz ditched his pickup truck along a dusty two-track road in northwest Tasmania and trod into a grove of eucalyptus. He was searching for a devil. "If I were a devil, this would be a nice place to spend the night," thought Ruiz, a wildlife veterinarian and doctoral candidate at the University of Tasmania. The Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) is the world's largest carnivorous marsupial. Despite that distinction, the animal is only about the