Inbreeding, Disease, Habitat Loss, Traffic And Now Fires Flattening Remaining Koala Populations
Australian wildfires raging through Queensland and New South Wales this month are threatening koalas, one of the country’s most beloved and iconic species. When koalas face danger, their response is to climb higher into the canopy and “curl themselves into a ball for protection,” reports Livia Albeck-Ripka of the New York Times. This defense mechanism, however, does not work when fire is involved. Officials estimate that as many as 350 of nearly 700 marsupials living in Port Macquarie perished in the blaze, which wiped out an estimated two-thirds of a local population’s habitat, or about 4,900 acres of land. Cheyne Flanagan, clinical director of the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital, calls the loss a “national tragedy.”
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Habitat loss, traffic collisions, dog attacks, disease and global warming have placed compounded pressure on the species for decades, and experts suggest matters will only get worse. Last year, writes the ABC’s Elise Kinsella, a Gold Coast city council report found that one of southeast Queensland’s largest koala populations could lose around half of its members over the next 20 years.
Koalas are currently considered “vulnerable” throughout their homeland of Australia, according to the IUCN Red List’s 2014 assessment. In lieu of the Australian Koala Foundation’s recent announcement that there are no more than 80,000 koalas left in the country—likely not enough to sustain reproduction in the long run—some experts say the species is “functionally extinct,” writes Christine Adams-Hosking for the Conversation.
The Australian Koala Foundation has monitored all 128 federal electorates of Australia since 2010 and found that 41 now have no koalas. In dozens of other districts, only small numbers of koalas remain. In some parts of Queensland, the koala population declined 80 percent between 1994 and 2016.
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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/australia-faces-national-tragedy-over-loss-koala-after-recent-brushfires-180973570/