Nearly an entire wombat population in Tasmania's north has been wiped out after an outbreak of a disease caused by tiny mites.
Sarcoptic mange, the same disease known as scabies in humans and dogs, is caused by tiny mites that burrow into the skin and set off an immune response that can make the host animal quite sick.
Scott Carver, a lecturer in wildlife ecology at the University of Tasmania, said the disease is fatal for the overwhelming majority of wombats that get infected.
"Ultimately their skin thickens up, they lose their fur and they usually die from secondary infections," he told AAP on Wednesday.
"It's really awful. It's quite heartbreaking to see how much they suffer from it."
An outbreak of the disease hit the Narawntapu National Park near Devonport in 2010 and has been slowly wiping out the common, or bare-nosed, wombat population.
"It started in the east of this national park and swept across to the west, killing all of the wombats in its wake," Dr Carver said.
There's been an overall population decline of 94 per cent, he said.
"There's a few just left down in the very western end of the park... but the population certainly looks like it's on the trajectory to local extinction."
The disease is thought to be spread by mites falling off wombats and infecting healthy wombats that use the same burrow. Mites can survive for about three weeks without a host in ideal conditions.
"We think that's why it's still causing steep declines even though there's not many wombats left," Dr Carver said.
There are a few different treatment options but they don't make the animals immune so they could become infected again, he said.
Last year the research team tried to treat the entire population and control the disease.
"We were quite successful at recovering individual wombats but we were less successful at recovering the population," Dr Carver said.
"At some point in the future we may need to consider doing a reintroduction to the population after the disease has disappeared."
