Are There Kangaroos in Tasmania? Identifying Native Macropods

Tasmania is home to several species of kangaroo and wallaby, along with smaller relatives that round out a diverse community of native macropods. The island state’s most conspicuous species is the Forester kangaroo, a subspecies of the eastern grey kangaroo found on the mainland, but it shares the landscape with Bennett’s wallabies, Tasmanian pademelons, long-nosed potoroos, and Tasmanian bettongs. What makes Tasmania’s macropod fauna distinctive is not just which species live there but how island isolation has shaped their populations, their ecological roles, and their relationships with predators and people.

Which Macropods Live in Tasmania

Tasmania supports at least five macropod or macropodoid species, spanning a remarkable size range. Across the broader macropod family, body mass runs from roughly one kilogram in the smallest potoroos up to about 90 kilograms in large mainland kangaroos.¹ Tasmania’s own representatives cover most of that spectrum.

The Forester kangaroo (Macropus giganteus tasmaniensis) is the largest. It is a subspecies of the eastern grey kangaroo and stands out in open grasslands and dry woodland in the state’s northeast and midlands. Adult males can weigh over 60 kilograms. If you picture the classic tall, grey kangaroo grazing in a paddock at dusk, the Forester is Tasmania’s version of that animal, though its range on the island is more restricted than its mainland counterpart’s.

Bennett’s wallaby (Macropus rufogriseus rufogriseus) is far more widespread and is arguably the macropod most Tasmanians encounter on a regular basis. Smaller than the Forester, it favors eucalypt forest edges and is comfortable in a range of habitats from coastal scrub to highland woodland. Visitors often spot Bennett’s wallabies at dawn and dusk feeding along forest margins and in clearings.

The Tasmanian pademelon (Thylogale billardierii) is the third conspicuous species. Compact and round, pademelons are smaller than wallabies and tend to stay close to dense vegetation, venturing into adjacent open ground to graze. They are abundant across much of Tasmania but have been extinct on the Australian mainland for well over a century, making the island their last stronghold.

Two smaller macropodoids fill out the roster. The long-nosed potoroo (Potorous tridactylus) and the Tasmanian bettong (Bettongia gaimardi) are both rat-sized hoppers that live in forest undergrowth. They are nocturnal, rarely seen by casual visitors, and play outsized ecological roles that belie their small stature.

How Tasmania’s Macropods Got There

Tasmania sits about 240 kilometers south of the Australian mainland, separated by Bass Strait. During periods of low sea level in the Pleistocene, that strait was dry land, and animals moved freely between the mainland and what is now Tasmania. The key question for biogeographers has been when Tasmanian populations became genetically isolated from their mainland relatives, and the answer varies by species.

For the long-nosed potoroo, genetic data point to a split between Tasmanian and mainland populations that predates the most recent flooding of Bass Strait. Major phylogeographic breaks within the species date to the Pliocene for the Tasmanian separation, meaning the island’s potoroos have been on a distinct evolutionary trajectory for millions of years, not just the roughly 12,000 years since the last land bridge disappeared.² That finding was surprising because a naive reading of the geology might suggest a simple story of recent isolation after sea levels rose. Instead, earlier barriers, likely dry or unfavorable habitat in the Bass Strait region during warmer periods, had already separated the populations well before the final flooding.

The Tasmanian pademelon shows a somewhat different pattern. Genetic sampling of 200 individuals across seven sites in Tasmania and two Bass Strait islands revealed high mitochondrial and nuclear genetic diversity, indicating large historical population sizes. Both types of genetic data pointed to a division of Tasmanian populations into eastern and western regions, suggesting that even within the island, landscape features have channeled gene flow.³ The pademelon’s strong genetic diversity is a reassuring sign that the species has maintained robust numbers over long timescales, even as forest fragmentation from European land clearing has reshaped its habitat in recent centuries.

Giant Kangaroos That Once Roamed the Island

Tasmania’s macropod story extends well beyond the species alive today. During the late Pleistocene, the island hosted megafaunal kangaroos that dwarfed the modern Forester. Some Pleistocene kangaroos may have weighed as much as 250 kilograms, nearly three times the mass of the largest living males.¹

Two extinct species have been directly identified from Tasmanian cave deposits. The giant short-faced kangaroo (Simosthenurus occidentalis) had a robust skull and a browsing diet quite unlike modern grazers. Radiocarbon dating placed one Tasmanian specimen at roughly 46,000 to 50,000 years ago. Alongside it, a giant wallaby (Protemnodon anak) has been dated to about 40,000 to 45,000 years ago.⁴ DNA recovered from these fossils using cross-species capture techniques has helped clarify where these animals sit on the macropod family tree, a question that was difficult to resolve from bones alone.

What makes Tasmania’s megafaunal record especially interesting is the timing. Direct dating of fossil remains and associated sediments shows that some Tasmanian megafauna survived until at least 41,000 years ago, which is after the same species had already disappeared from mainland Australia.⁵ That overlap with human arrival on the island has fed debate about whether people drove these extinctions or whether climate change was the primary factor. The late survival in Tasmania, where humans arrived later than on the mainland, points toward human involvement as at least a contributing cause.

More recently, collagen fingerprinting has been applied to Tasmanian cave material. A short-faced kangaroo dentary from Femur Fest Cave, estimated at roughly 100,000 years old, yielded a usable collagen fingerprint, demonstrating that molecular identification techniques can work on remains spanning the critical window of human arrival and megafauna extinction.⁶ As more cave sites are sampled with these methods, the picture of what once hopped through Tasmanian forests will continue to sharpen.

The Ecological Roles of Potoroos and Bettongs

The smallest macropodoids in Tasmania do things that the larger wallabies and kangaroos do not, and their contributions to forest health are easy to overlook. Both the long-nosed potoroo and the Tasmanian bettong are dedicated fungus eaters. In eucalypt forests across Australia, several marsupial species feed predominantly on the underground fruiting bodies of fungi, and this feeding disperses fungal spores through the forest. Because these fungi form partnerships with tree roots, helping trees absorb water and nutrients, the animals that spread the spores play an important role in maintaining healthy forest.⁷

Potoroos and bettongs also reshape the soil itself. When they dig for food, they create small foraging pits that alter the ground in measurable ways. Research in Tasmanian temperate woodland found that soil from these pits had higher fertility than undisturbed soil in low-fertility eucalypt forest types. The pits also held more moisture than the surrounding ground, while the spoil heaps kicked up beside them were drier. Soil hardness dropped markedly in both pits and spoil heaps compared to undug areas.⁸ The net effect is a patchwork of micro-habitats across the forest floor: wetter spots that catch seeds and organic matter, looser soil that roots and invertebrates can penetrate more easily, and small nutrient hotspots that boost local plant growth.

This ecosystem engineering is one reason conservationists worry about declining potoroo and bettong populations. On the mainland, many digging marsupials have been devastated by foxes and cats. Tasmania’s freedom from foxes gives its populations a crucial advantage, though feral cats remain a threat to these small animals. Where digging mammals disappear, the soil processes they drive slow down or stop, with cascading effects on the forest community above and below ground.

Predators and the Macropod Food Web

Tasmania’s macropods exist within a predator community that differs strikingly from the mainland’s. The island’s two native mammalian carnivores, the Tasmanian devil and the spotted-tailed quoll, are both significant predators or scavengers of macropods. The thylacine was a third until its extinction in the twentieth century.

The Tasmanian devil is better understood as a scavenger than a hunter, though it does both. Video collar research showed that devils spent more time scavenging than actively hunting, cleaning up carcasses of all sizes. Small carrion items were scavenged most frequently, highlighting the devil’s role in processing not just the large carcasses it is famous for stripping clean but also small dead animals scattered through the bush.⁹

The relationship between devils and spotted-tailed quolls is complex. Both predators eat macropods, and their diets overlap considerably. Quolls have been recorded killing adult male pademelons weighing six to seven kilograms, but it is unclear how often they actually take prey that large. A more common dynamic may be that quolls scavenge macropod carcasses from devil kills, a commensal arrangement where the smaller predator benefits from the larger one’s work. Only devils have jaws specialized for crushing bone and chewing through thick skin, which means they process parts of a carcass that quolls cannot.¹⁰

The thylacine’s role in this system, and what changed when it vanished, is harder to pin down. Research on the foraging behavior of three Tasmanian macropod species found it difficult to disentangle the effects of past thylacine predation from the animals’ current behavior. One possibility is that the extinction of the thylacine in the last century led to an evolutionary loss of certain anti-predator behaviors, such as adjustments to group size. Another possibility is that thylacines were never as important a predator on Tasmanian macropod subspecies as is sometimes assumed.¹¹ Either way, the removal of a top predator from Tasmania’s ecosystem happened recently enough that its consequences are still being studied.

Devil facial tumor disease has added urgency to these questions. As devil populations have crashed in parts of Tasmania, researchers have watched for changes in macropod abundance and behavior in areas where devils have become scarce. If devils decline further, the loss of their scavenging and predation could have knock-on effects throughout the macropod community, potentially favoring some species while removing a check on others.

Macropods and Tasmanian Agriculture

For Tasmanian farmers, the abundance of wallabies and pademelons is not purely a conservation success story. Browsing by native macropods is a persistent source of pasture loss, and the scale of the impact depends heavily on where a paddock sits relative to forest cover.

Research measuring pasture biomass loss over a 26-month period in the Tasmanian midlands found that wildlife grazing varied both spatially and over time. Losses were greatest close to the edge of cover vegetation, which makes sense given that wallabies and pademelons shelter in forest during the day and emerge to graze at the margins. The proportion of pasture lost also increased during periods when grass was growing slowly, meaning that wildlife grazing hit hardest exactly when pastures could least afford it. Continual grazing by wildlife on top of rotational sheep grazing increased bare ground and reduced the yield and ground cover of improved grasses.¹²

This creates a tension that plays out across rural Tasmania. Pademelons and Bennett’s wallabies are native and ecologically important, but their feeding on improved pasture affects farm productivity. Management options range from exclusion fencing to regulated shooting permits, and the debate over how aggressively to control macropod numbers is ongoing. Farmers near forest margins face the heaviest browsing pressure, while those with large open paddocks far from bush experience relatively little. The spatial pattern documented in the research matches what most Tasmanian graziers already know intuitively: the closer you are to the bush, the more you share your pasture.

Telling Tasmania’s Macropods Apart in the Field

If you visit Tasmania and want to identify what you are looking at, size and habitat offer the best starting clues. A large grey animal standing upright in open grassland or dry woodland in the northeast is almost certainly a Forester kangaroo. They are tall enough that confusion with other species is unlikely once you have seen one. The Forester’s range on the island is concentrated in the northern midlands and east coast, so sightings in the state’s west or southwest are unusual.

Bennett’s wallabies are the mid-sized macropod you will see most often. They have a reddish-brown nape and shoulders contrasting with greyer fur elsewhere, and they are comfortable in a broader range of habitats than the Forester. If you are driving at dusk on rural roads almost anywhere in Tasmania, the animals hopping across in front of you are most likely Bennett’s wallabies.

Pademelons are noticeably smaller and rounder than Bennett’s wallabies, with shorter ears and a more compact build. They tend to stay within a short dash of dense cover, so you are most likely to spot them at forest edges or in gardens that back onto bush. Their posture when feeding is hunched rather than upright, which gives them a distinctive silhouette even in low light.

Potoroos and bettongs are a different proposition entirely. Both are small, nocturnal, and rarely seen without deliberate effort. The long-nosed potoroo has a distinctly elongated, pointed snout that sets it apart from the more rounded face of the bettong. The Tasmanian bettong has a slightly tufted tail and is a bit more open in its habitat use than the potoroo, which prefers dense undergrowth. Spotlighting walks in suitable forest habitat are the best way to encounter either species, though even then, sightings are not guaranteed.

Why Tasmania Matters for Macropod Conservation

Several of Tasmania’s macropods are now restricted to the island and nearby Bass Strait islands, even though they once occurred on the mainland. The Tasmanian pademelon has been extinct on mainland Australia since European settlement, driven out by a combination of habitat clearance and predation by introduced foxes. The Tasmanian bettong was also once widespread across southeastern Australia but disappeared from the mainland in the twentieth century. For both species, Tasmania is it.

The absence of foxes from Tasmania has been the single most important factor in preserving these populations. Foxes have devastated small and medium-sized marsupials across mainland Australia, and their absence gives Tasmanian species a buffer that no management program can fully replicate. There have been occasional scares about foxes reaching Tasmania, including reported sightings and the discovery of a fox carcass in 2001, and the state government has invested in monitoring and response programs to keep the island fox-free.

Climate change introduces a newer source of uncertainty. Tasmania’s relatively cool, wet climate supports the dense forest habitats that pademelons, potoroos, and bettongs depend on. If drying trends reduce forest cover or increase fire frequency, the species that shelter in dense undergrowth could lose ground. The genetic east-west division seen in pademelon populations hints at how landscape features already channel and constrain movement across the island.³ If habitat patches shrink or become more isolated, those genetic divisions could deepen, reducing the resilience of populations that have so far maintained healthy diversity.

For the Forester kangaroo, the challenge is different. Its preferred open grassland and dry woodland habitats in the northeast have been extensively modified for agriculture, and its range on the island is more restricted than it once was. Conservation efforts have focused on maintaining corridors between habitat patches and managing interactions with farming, but the Forester’s future depends on whether enough suitable habitat remains connected for a viable population over the long term.