![]() ![]() The word koala comes from an Aboriginal language. Their closest living relative is the wombat. Koalas are not bears, however: They’re marsupials. ![]() The animal's scientific name, Phascolarctos cinereus, loosely means "ash-gray pocket-bear." The stuff is full of microorganisms to get their tiny digestive tracts ready for a lifetime of toxic leaves for lunch. Pap is a kind of soup that forms in a mother koala's cecum and is excreted-so yes, baby koalas eat their mother’s droppings. Koala joeys feed on their mother’s "pap." They can only stay awake for four hours a day. On the other hand, they have tiny brains because brains use a lot of energy and their diets don’t give them much to work with. Koalas sleep a lot.īecause of their diet, koalas have an unusually large cecum-the beginning of the large intestine-to help them digest their diet of eucalyptus leaves. They are reported to smell like cough drops because of all that eucalyptus. Eucalyptus leaves are very low in calcium, forcing the koalas to go to the ground and eat dirt. The problem is that two trees of the same species right next to each other can have wildly different toxin levels, forcing the koala to rely on their smell. Koalas prefer large trees, but avoid those with low protein content and nauseating toxins. They’re very picky, tending to choose around 30 of the 600 varieties of eucalyptus trees out there. Koalas eat around half a kilogram of eucalyptus leaves a day. Koala fingerprints can be mistaken for one another in criminal investigations. Undefined undefined/iStock via Getty Images Koalas fingerprints are virtually indistinguishable from human ones. Now, rather than overpopulation, a combination of habitat loss and a retrovirus is making chlamydia a problem even as the population dwindles. When koalas are stressed, chlamydia-which is normally harmless-limits the population growth. In other areas where chlamydia-free koalas were introduced, the koalas killed the trees and then died of starvation. Without chlamydia to control the population, koala numbers doubled every few years, and thousands of hectares of forest were at threat until hormonal contraception was introduced. In the late '90s, chlamydia-free koalas were introduced into Mount Eccles National Park in Victoria, which had a huge Manna Gum tree population. Predators aren’t that important to koala population control, but chlamydia might be. Up to 90 percent of female koalas have chlamydia. They last twice as long as female-male encounters. In captivity, sexual encounters among koalas have been known to involve up to five females. They saw that when the weather was warm, the animals moved to lower parts of the trees and pressed themselves close to the trunks, wedging their butts right into the coolest spots. Scientists used thermal cameras to watch koalas hanging out in trees. But here are a few surprising things you might not have known about koalas. Sure, they're cute, and they certainly look cuddly. ![]()
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