Aussie Ark is an animal preservation project based near the Barrington Tops of New South Wales, Australia. Originally known as Devil Ark, its original goal was to only breed（培育）and preserve Tasmanian devils（袋獾）.
About the size of a big domestic cat, the Tasmanian devil is the world's largest living marsupial carnivore（有袋食肉动物）. Its bigger cousin， the Tasmanian tiger，died out in 1936. Devil numbers were stable until 1996, when a strange disease suddenly began destroying devil populations across Tasmania. Devil facial tumour disease (DFTD), within a few months, is an infectious cancer spread by bites during fights over food and mates. There's still no cure despite a quarter-century of dedicated research, and devils have suffered an 80-90 per cent decline. A second type of DFTD, just as deadly, was identified in 2014.
After the devil was declared endangered in 2008, increased effort went into establishing isolated DFTD-free insurance populations. Tasmania's offshore Maria Island supports a small introduced group of healthy devils, and the Forestier-Tasman Peninsula has the only disease-free population in its native range, but Aussie Ark has more devils than both the above two and is the biggest and wildest mainland breeding facility. As an innovative and wildly successful conservation project, Aussie Ark has spent the last decade creating a healthy mainland population of the endangered Tasmanian devils, mainly by letting them act naturally in a large-scale bush shelter. A big part of its success is the suitability of its landscape. The Ark's cool-climate, high-altitude (1, 300m)snow-gum forest has proved very devil-friendly. Launched in 201l with 44 DFTD-free devils, Aussie Ark has bred more than 350 devil babies now, a record outside Tasmania, and holds over half the devils in mainland Australia.
