Thermal imaging drones, sniffer dogs, police, and a growing army of volunteers are being deployed in the Australian state of Queensland after a nefarious Tasmanian Devil escaped its zoo enclosure to begin life on the run.
The two-year-old missing marsupial miscreant is named Mary.
She fled the Paradise Country wildlife park on the Gold Coast in the dead of night, after arriving at the facility last month, ABC News reports. The "dead of night." Could it have been at any other time?
Park officials said the perimeter had been scoured with Queensland Police and Wildcare Australia also joining the search as it expanded into surrounding areas.
University of Queensland adjunct professor and captive animal management expert Al Mucci told the ABC he believed Mary was likely still nearby.
“There is a lot of natural bushland area surrounding Paradise Country, so she could move up to a kilometre or so,” he said, per the ABC report.
“She’s probably a little bit scared because it’s all new and maybe [she] found a little hidey spot near a log or a dog kennel even.”
Come on. She's not scared. She's living life large.
Tasmanian devils are extinct on the Australian mainland and endangered in the island state of Tasmania, where fewer than 25,000 remain in the wild.
While generally shy, they can be bitey and aggressive when provoked or approached by humans, or for no reason whatsoever. They do, after all, have to live up to their name of devils.
Mary no doubt plans to help her brother and sister devils to break out too, then re-establish a breeding population on the Australian mainland. Then, after that, world domination is the plan.
