TASMANIAN DEVILS PUZZLE SCIENCE WITH PICKY EATING HABITS

Our champion scavengers are creatures of taste, apparently.

Scavengers are known for their lack of discernment – they’ll eat whatever they can find, whenever they can find it. But one Australian animal is breaking all the rules: the Tasmanian devil.

“We’ve found that most Tasmanian devils are actually picky and selective eaters,” says Tracey Rogers, a professor at UNSW and senior author of a new study in Ecology and Evolution.

The study analysed eating habits of 71 devils from seven different sites in Tasmania using whisker samples, which carry chemical imprints of their diet.

It turns out that individual devils have their own tastes and preferences – much like us – and can be decidedly picky eaters, unlike other scavenger species like wolverines and hyenas. According to the researchers, this upends what we know about scavenger ecology.