Tags : Australian koala extinction, koala
Koalas in Danger of Extinction in Three Decades
Canberra, Australia (AHN) – Already affected by warmer global temperatures that reduce nutrients in their food, Australia’s koala have significantly declined because of habitat destruction and disease, and may become extinct in 30 years.
The Australian Koala Foundation said as few as 43,000 and no more than 80,000 of the marsupials are left in the mainland. The group presented its new findings on Monday before the Environment Ministry’s Threatened Species Steering Committee, which decides next year whether to list the koala as threatened.
Previous estimates had put the koala population at 100,000. At that number, conservationists had called on the committee to include the koala among federally protected species.
“We have individually measured over 80,000 trees and we have 1,800 field sites,” Australian Koala Foundation CEO Deborah Tabart said in a statement. “In previous nominations the [committee] took the ridiculous approach of saying that ‘forests had increased so koalas must have’.”
The rapid decline is due to a combination of factors. It has lost its habitat to growing human settlements, and has suffered outbreaks of disease such as pneumonia and blindness caused by chlamydia. Living in close proximity to homes has caused stress on the animals, making them more vulnerable to disease, and harming them with waterways containing garden pesticides. More than 4,000 koalas are also killed every year by cars and dogs.
Koalas are one of the most recognized national symbols worldwide, and bring into Australia more than $1.1 billion in revenues from tourism.
They are tree-dwelling herbivores that were nearly hunted to extinction during the fur trade in the 1920s, when as much as 2 million koala pelts were exported to Europe and the United State. They are known to be very picky eaters, living entirely on several varieties of eucalypt leaves.
Eucalypts are low in protein and high in toxins, and have been found to decline in nutrient content but increase in toxicity when exposed to higher carbon dioxide levels. Ian Hume, Emeritus Professor of Biology at Sydney University, had issued those findings in 2008, warning that koalas may die of starvation because of global warming.
Koalas inhabit four states in Australia – Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia – and each has its own law on how to protect the animal. Enforcement is often left by federal and state governments to local agencies that have limited resources and expertise in wildlife management, according to the Foundation.
State governments in the 1990s began efforts to ban cuddling of koalas despite overwhelming opposition from tourism authorities and an acrimonious public debate over whether handling them actually causes the animal stress. New South Wales and Victoria now prohibit cuddling but let tourists pet the animals while perched on a tree, while Queensland allows cuddling only for 30 minutes a day, and with every third day reserved to let the animal rest.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN ) lists the koala as “potentially vulnerable” but the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 2000 decided to raise the conservation status of the animal to “threatened,” a category below “endangered.”
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