KOALAS : the Teddies of Oz

by Jasmine
When I was a bright-eyed, somewhat completely innocent little girl, my father went to Australia and came back home bearing stuffed toy koalas -- three of them, one for each little girl in the family. He brought home one for my mother, too: a mommy koala, dressed in orange coveralls and standing upright. It was my very first face-to-facethe strange little native creature of Australia that was known as a 'koala'.

For years afterwards, all that ignoramus of a little girl knew of koalas was that they were grey (because the stuffed toy koala I had was gray in color) , had painful gripping claws (because the dolls had them too), and bright, round, curious little eyes (because most cartoons would portray them like that). Oh, and they were bear-like.

Hence the name, koala bear.

All in all, hear me describing a koala and you'd imagine it as something like this:

Sounds like my koala could look like this.

Which, by the way, is a fairly accurate representation considering the little girl I was when describing this animal. Can you not hear my younger self's repeated squeals of  "CUTE" overriding every part of the image?

Only today, though, specially for this blog on Australia (read more about why Australia of all places here), did I bother to open my dusty encyclopedia and find out more about these furry little grey creatures.

And guess what? They're not koala bears after all -- only we outsiders call them that, due to the ingenious observation that these koalas closely resembled bears. So much that we might consider them cousins -- except, (trumpets play here please) their closest cousins are actually the wombat.

With that, I settled down to see what else was could astound me about koalas. The facts below have a prerequisite of being labelled at least 'rather intriguing, I never knew that' to 'completely unexpected, what a shocker!', so don't stop reading here; trust me, you will be surprised.

1. Koalas are like kangaroos.

Koala: Er, say what?
Kangaroo: Come again?

....as in, they have something in common with one another. And no, it's not that they're both native Australian animals.

Both koalas and kangaroos have pouches in which they carry their younglings.( The term used is 'marsupial'). It can be said that the baby koala is practically born twice -- the main characteristic of marsupials is that the young ones are born immature, barely more than an embryo, and are placed into the mother's protective pouch during development that takes place after their birth. These baby koalas have to make the climb up its mother's body into the pouch by themselves, so they're also born with strong, gripping claws to help them accomplish this vital survival task.

That also explains why my stuffed koala plushie had them, even if it was a just a baby.

Oh, yeah -- and like the kangaroos, baby koalas are also called 'joeys'.

2. Koala = literally, does not drink

The root word behind 'koala' implies the truth behind a koala's diet : it mainly eats -- mostly eucalyptus leaves only, though -- and barely drinks. Hence the word 'koobor', the Australian Aborigines' term for the little creature, meaning 'does not drink.'. The koalas, in fact, only drink when the eucalyptus greens they chew doesn't hydrate them enough, or when they're ill -- kind of like when I only eat rice porridge / bubur if I'm sick, I..suppose? 

There's actually a legend behind the tale, with many different versions, but the one I heard was that once, a terrible drought swept through the Aborigines' land, and a koala came to them for help. The ancient Aborigines refused to give the koala any water, and so it cried. In super-abbreviated storytelling, it then stole their water skins, feared being killed, stored the water inside a eucalyptus and took refuge there. Since then, the koala's habitat was the eucalyptus, and it would only ever drink what water it had hidden in the eucalyptus.

...poor legendary koala.

3. Koalas have a lot in common with babies. Human ones.

They're very picky eaters, for one thing. The koala only eats about thirty-five of the six hundred species of the eucalyptus. An extra, apparently trivial (to the koalas, at least) side-note, the koala's resident food source is mostly poisonous and hard to chew. The koalas of course have special features for overcoming this.

When they're still in the mother's pouch, the baby koala drinks nothing but milk.

They also sleep. A lot. About 18 hours per day on average. Kind of like your younger siblings(or you) when they were still babies, don't you think?

They like to stay up late, though. What I meant by that is that they're largely nocturnal.

4. Koalas do camouflage.

..It's nothing chameleon-like, but their ash-gray fur coat is apparently quite hard to see on the ground!

Their fur has doubles up as a raincoat that helps to keep water out as well as the heat in. You can tell the males apart from the females by a distinct brown streak across their chest, which is actually some kind of scent-gland.

The most important sense for koalas is the sense of smell, which is used to mark their territories as well as various other activities predictably done by any other animal.

5. The threats to koalas are dogs, cars, and humans.

Actually, there's nothing surprising there. Maybe the first two -- I can see newspapers with blaring headlines of "man's best friend, killer of koalas?!" and "the four-wheeled machine, convicted of the murder of the huggable four-legged creature" but really, what's more realistic is the long list of articles that mention how the all-too-human activity of land-clearing is causing the loss of habitat and by extension the large losses of life among the cute koalas. What will be said about it? What can be done about it? 

The truly disturbing thing is that koalas also die from disease. And not just from any disease, but from cancer, the prime example being leukemia.

Can we take over now?

On that note, I shall now rest and let the cuteness of koalas dominate the end of this post. The little girl in me is still staring at the stuffed toy koala from the past, lip trembling and all, but at least I'm no longer thinking, "Whaaa-aaaaat is that thing?!! I know nothing about it!"

And neither are you, I would hope. 

C'mere, joeys :3 

*Jasmine is now busy being assaulted by the weird cuteness of koalas and is no longer available*