The koala wars

It's cute and it's cuddly. And in 30 years, campaigners say, the koala will be extinct. But this emblematic animal has a curious history – and its fate is mired in politics.

Gideon Haigh
The Guardian, Monday 23 November 2009

When south-eastern Australia was consumed by bushfires in February, one image shut out all others. Nearly 200 humans might have perished, but a koala had been saved: videoed in a blackened landscape imbibing thirstily from the water bottle of a volunteer firefighter, Sam featured in newspapers from the New York Times to the Sun, and became a hit on CNN, YouTube and a website created by her veterinary carers.

According to the Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, she was the subject of widespread comment at the G20 summit in London in April this year, and he issued a personal tribute to this "symbol of hope" when Sam died six months later. "It's tragic that Sam the koala is no longer with us," Rudd said, just restraining himself from decreeing a state funeral.

Political leaders, however, appropriate symbols at their peril. A fortnight ago in Canberra, representatives of the Australian Koala Foundation (AKF) took a long and determined campaign for better protection of the creature to the government's "threatened species scientific committee", following a request for a review of the animal's status by environment minister Peter Garrett. The foundation presented what they say is definitive evidence of a sharp decline in koala numbers due to habitat destruction and disease. Its message was stark: the koala would be extinct "within 30 years". Hits on its website instantly doubled, and concerns were expressed about the impact on Australia's tourist industry: polls consistently show the koala to be the country's most popular animal with visitors.

In the AKF's chief executive Deborah Tabart, meanwhile, Rudd faces an implacable and outspoken critic, one who will now be dogging his steps at next month's Copenhagen climate change conference. Rudd may have been nice about Sam the koala, but Tabart does not think Rudd is doing enough for the species; she describes him as a "bureaucrat who hides behind policy and writing documents". The koala, she mutters darkly, "has many powerful enemies".

It has certainly had its detractors. The koala features in fossil records as far back as 25 million years ago, and has an honoured place in aboriginal creation myths, but when Gerald Durrell described it as "the most boring of all animals", he was far from the first to do so.

The koala is assuredly a creature of leisure. It has the smallest brain proportionally of any mammal, sleeps most of the day, and dedicates much of the rest to chewing gum leaves. The first description published in England 200 years ago, in fact, introduced the koala as the "New Holland Sloth". In his Arcana; or The Museum of Natural History (1881), the naturalist George Perry was severely censorious of the koala's "sluggishness and inactivity", and thought its "clumsy appearance" was "void of elegance".

"We are at a loss to imagine for what particular scale of usefulness or happiness such an animal could by the great Author of Nature possibly be destined," concluded Perry, although his respect for that particular author compelled him to concede: "As Nature however provides nothing vain, we may suppose that even these torpid, senseless creatures are wisely intended to fill up one of the great links of the chain of animated nature, and to shew forth the extensive variety of the created beings which GOD has, in his wisdom, constructed."

Nor was the koala then prized for cuddliness, being widely hunted for its fur from the 1870s, and provoking relatively little interest overseas. The first specimen to make it to England met an untimely end in the office of the superintendent of the Zoological Society, asphyxiated by the lid of a washing-stand that fell on its head.

Cuddly anthropomorphism

The koala's installation in national favour owes much to eager exercises in anthropomorphism in the early 20th century, first in cartoons published in the legendary nationalist periodical the Bulletin, then in children's tales such as Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding (1918) and Dorothy Wall's Blinky Bill (1933).

Lindsay offered Bunyip Bluegum as a koala of culture, with boater, bowtie and walking stick, while Wall's Blinky was a marsupial of mischief, dressed in knickerbockers and bearing a knapsack, although sufficiently patriotic to join the army during the second world war.

If it was considered inadequately industrious for the 19th century, the ­ koala was exquisitely suited to the cuteness-conscious 20th. Indeed, it is appropriate that the AKF's case is accented to the environmental pressures the koala faces in Rudd's home state of Queensland, where it is the faunal emblem, and has always had political claws.

It was in Queensland that the koala was the subject of Australia's first concerted environmental campaign after the state Labor government, in response to pressure from trappers who had denuded koala populations to the south, proclaimed an open season on the animal in August 1927.

Resistance orchestrated by the Queensland Naturalists Club and the Nature Lovers' League inspired one newspaper to print an edition bordered in black, and flushed out celebrity apologists including the writer Vance Palmer. "The shooting of our harmless and lovable native bear is nothing less than barbarous," he thundered. "There is not a social vice that can be put down to his account . . . He affords no sport to the gunman . . . and he has been almost been blotted out already in some areas."

The trappers had their way, slaughtering and skinning no fewer than a million koalas, but the Labor government paid the price, being swept from power at the next election. Australia's first three fauna parks, set up in the late 1920s, were then dedicated to koalas.

Researching all this for his book Koala: The Origins of an Icon (2007), biologist Dr Stephen Jackson was astonished by the ardour he encountered. "You read now what was being published then, and you think: 'Wow! These people really went off.' It's almost the beginning of the conservation movement in Australia, because it mobilised people as never before." And although nobody has since posited a Queensland koala equivalent of the Curse of Gnome, there is some evidence for it.

Seventy years after that pioneering koala campaign, for example, federal tourism minister John Brown famously dismissed the animals as "flea-ridden, piddling, stinking, scratching, rotten little things"; he left politics soon after following allegations he had misled parliament over a tender submitted by a contractor.

The 1995 state election was then dominated by a Labor government plan to drive a major roadway through a key koala habitat. An apparently unassailable majority dwindled unsustainably when Labor lost what became known as the "koala seats" in Brisbane Bayside. Oddly, Rudd – then chief-of-staff to the premier of Queensland – was mixed up in the row over that koala habitat.

In the end, those koalas probably did Rudd a favour – and now Tabart thinks it is payback time. She is an unpredictable political opponent. An entrant 40 years ago in the Miss Australia pageant, she explains her failure candidly: "I didn't sleep with one of the judges, so I didn't win."

Tabart has made a particular target of Professor Bob Beeton of the University of Queensland, the chairman of the aforementioned threatened species scientific committee, which four years ago rejected an AKF application for listing of the koala as "vulnerable". "That determination sits on my desk to this day, and it outrages me," she says. To Beeton's statements that his committee might take up to a year to report back to environment minister Peter Garrett, she retorts: "The minister doesn't have that time – and nor does the koala."

Beeton has a droll line or two as well. While naturalists describe the koala as representative of "charismatic megafauna", Beeton is unmoved by charisma: under pressure from a television interviewer last week, he responded that his committee would grant protection of the koala as much consideration as protection of the death adder – the subject of another recent determination. Asked about advocacy groups in general, and the proposition that no such group has ever prospered from buoyant pronouncements of abundance, he invokes Francis Urquhart in House of Cards: "You might well think that. I couldn't possibly comment."

Threatened by disease

Far from being new, Beeton observes, disease is a perennial problem in the koala community. The Chlamydia organism, which finally carried off Sam, may be present in as many as half of Australia's koalas – just as it is also present in about a third of humans.

Another spectre cited in recent publicity concerning the koala is a newly identified but little understood retrovirus, originally given the acronym KoRV, but now more catchily abbreviated as Kids (Koala Immune Deficiency Syndrome). Beeton believes that a great deal more needs to be known about the condition: "It's very hard for a single disease to kill a species. We couldn't kill rabbits in Australia with myxomatosis."

There is clearly much argy-bargy to come. The AKF's prospects will depend on its ability to use global concerns to influence domestic policies; for Australians, the koala reposes, at least at the moment, on a list of "things-to-be-concerned-about-had-I-the-time".

So far, it has made its case with only a broad brush. Because of her suspicions of the Species Committee, Tabart says that the foundation is unprepared as yet to divulge full details of its data, on grounds that earlier data presented to the Species Committee was "used against the koala". She will say only that it results from the examination of 80,000 trees at 2,000 field sites and concludes that the population may be as low as 43,000, compared with previously assumed figures comfortably in six figures. This leaves the foundation open to criticism because, as Jackson points out, koala numbers depend quite heavily on where you look: "If you talk to biologists [in Victoria], they'll tell you: 'Koalas are falling out of the trees down here. We don't know what to do with them.'"

Statistics that are public, however, include those of widespread land clearing in Queensland until its cessation in January 2007, after a decade in which up to 700,000 hectares of habitat was being destroyed annually under the influence of property developers and resources companies – a reckless abandon whose environmental effects are still little understood.

In this sense, Sam the koala was an ironic representative of her species, survivor of a calamity amply publicised and readily understood; far greater ecological damage on Australia has been inflicted by easy government acquiescence.

Gideon Haigh is one of Australia's leading cricket writers.

Chew leaves – sleep for 18 hours The life of a koala

When a koala dies, a new occupant won't move into its home range for about a year – the time it takes for scratches on the trees and scent markings to disappear. Then, as long as they are not disturbed, koalas keep their home ranges (a group of several trees that they regularly visit) throughout their lives – up to 18 years.

Often called koala bears because of their cuddly teddy-bear appearance, they are of course marsupials – and can be aggressive. They breed once a year (koalas usually only produce a single cub, or joey, though occasionally give birth to twins), and once a cub is born – 2cm long, blind and hairless after a gestation period of 35 days – it relies on its sense of smell and touch to crawl into its mother's pouch, where it stays for the next six months, feeding on milk. After it emerges, the cub will remain with its mother until it is a year old, riding on her back or clinging to her belly.

The adult koala's days are filled with sleeping and eating. They survive on a diet of predominantly eucalyptus leaves and bark – to most animals, eucalyptus leaves are incredibly poisonous, but the koala's digestive system has evolved to manage the toxins. It is often said that eucalyptus makes koalas "stoned" – probably because they sleep for up to 18 hours a day, wedged between branches of eucalyptus trees – but this isn't true: their high-fibre, low-nutrition diet means they have to sleep to conserve energy.

They also don't tend to drink, getting almost all the water they need from leaves. In fact, the name koala is thought to come from a name in one Aboriginal language meaning "doesn't drink". Emine Saner

Going, going . . . Endangered flagship species

Giant panda

The poster-bear of the wildlife conservation movement and symbol of the WWF since 1961. "Charismatic or flagship species tend to be larger animals that take up a larger space," says Amanda Nickson, director of its international species programme. "By conserving these, you help to conserve everything smaller that shares their habitat. Pandas were one of the earliest species that people became aware were threatened; they show we can bring species back from the brink of extinction." There is still much work to do, though: only 1,600 pandas are left in the wild in southern and eastern China.

Tiger

In the last 100 years, the tiger population has decreased by 95%, three sub-species have become extinct and a fourth has not been spotted in the wild for 25 years. There are thought to be around 3,200 tigers left in the wild in south and east Asia, but they are endangered by poaching for the trade in tiger body parts (used in traditional Chinese medicine) and their skins, loss of prey and the more long-term threat of habitat loss. "The global community needs to take action now," says Nickson.

African elephant

Elephants losing their habitat as human populations encroach is a relatively recent threat, but while the global ban on illegal ivory in 1989 helped, poaching remains a problem. It is thought the population of around 600,000 is decreasing by 38,000 every year, and one recent estimate suggested large groups could be extinct by 2020. "Elephants are still being slaughtered daily to supply the illegal trade in ivory," says Robbie Marsland, UK Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

Blue whale

Before the extensive whaling of the 20th century – in 1931, 29,000 blue whales were killed in one season alone – it is thought there were around 250,000 blue whales at any one time. By 1966, when the International Whaling Commission banned blue whale hunting, they were almost extinct; now there are around 2,300. "Despite our best efforts, their numbers aren't recovering as well as we would hope," says Nickson. "Blue whales are a symbol of why we can't allow species to become too endangered. We allowed their numbers to get too low, and we need to learn lessons." ES

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/23/koala-extinction-australia-political-war