The Koala Paradox
Photographs by James Bugg
Ten-month-old Emerson fixed his big brown eyes on me and yawned. Still groggy from a nap, the koala rubbed his face, then stuck out an expectant paw. The nurse escorting me through his enclosure smiled. “He’s looking for his milk,” she said.
Four months earlier, when Emerson was admitted to Northern Rivers Koala Hospital, in New South Wales, Australia, he was so small that volunteers had to feed him with a syringe, dribbling formula into his mouth, his furry body swaddled in a towel. Now healthy and about five pounds, he was one of the most effortlessly anthropomorphized animals I had ever come across. With his big nose and round-bodied floofiness, his shuffling movements, his droopy eyelids and eagerness to cuddle, he seemed like nature’s ultimate cross between a teddy bear, a bumbling grandpa, and a sleepy toddler.
“The first thing I tell my volunteers when they come here to start is: ‘You will not be cuddling these koalas,’ ” Jen Ridolfi, the volunteer coordinator for Friends of the Koala, the nonprofit that runs Northern Rivers, told me. But sometimes even the most stoic get attached. Many koalas spend months here; volunteers call them “dear,” “sweetie,” and “love.” I watched one volunteer lean down to coo at a male named Gigachad. “I just want to kiss his nose,” she said, before quickly assuring me that she wouldn’t. Even FOK’s veterinary staff will occasionally pat the backs of koalas during routine checkups or slip a hand into the paw of an animal under anesthesia.
Ridolfi is vigilant about volunteers for a reason. Of the roughly 350 koalas admitted annually to Northern Rivers, only about a third survive. Chief among the threats they face is chlamydia—yes, that chlamydia—a bacterial infection that in koalas, as in humans, spreads primarily via sex, and can cause blindness, infertility, and other severe, sometimes fatal complications. Car collisions and dog attacks are not far behind. Koalas are also vulnerable to cancers, fungal infections, herpes, parasites, kidney problems, mange, and a retrovirus that might leave them immunocompromised.
These acute perils are compounded by more chronic ones: habitat destruction; genetic fragility; and climate change, which fuels heat waves, droughts, and wildfires that scorch the trees that koalas live in and eat from. “The biology of the species has been hammered by humans,” Edward Narayan, a biologist at the University of Queensland, told me. Some in Queensland, New South Wales, and the Australian Capital Territory, essentially the eastern third of the country.
