The Great Koala Count

all right hello everybody and welcome to our celebration of national science week
2024 here at CSIRO my name is Dr Samantha Monroe and I am an ecologist
here at cro and I am also your host for today's webcast now when we found out
that this year's theme for National Science week was species survival we absolutely knew we wanted to put
something together to reach out to schools on this really important topic currently there are 1,700 different
species all across Australia that are threatened with Extinction so this is a really big problem that we all need to
work together to solve now today we're going to be talking about one of the species that might be in a bit of
trouble and that is of course our amazing and iconic koala today we want to talk to you about a program we have
at CSIRO that's been created to count koalas work out how many koalas there
actually are in Australia and also where they live this program is called the national koala monitoring program we're
also going to talk to you about how you can help us count koalas and become of a bit a bit of a scientist yourself and at
the end you will get a chance to ask us some of your best koala
questions now before we get started it is really important to acknowledge that we are all coming together today from
many different parts of the country so I would like to begin by acknowledging the bindle and w garoo people who are the
traditional owners of the land that I am speaking from today up in North Queensland and pay my respects to their
Elders past present and emerging a couple quick housekeeping
notes for everyone if for whatever reason you can't hear me right now you have clicked the muted button so you're
going to want to unmute me that controls how whether or not you can hear me not whether or not I can hear you you can
also control the volume of today's presentation and add close captioning using the options at the bottom of the
screen now as I mentioned you will be able to ask some ask some koala questions at the end and you can submit
these using a Q&A function on the side of your screen you should see a little chat icon with a question mark over it
click on that and a panel will open up where you can submit your questions and feel free to do this throughout the
presentation and we'll get to as many as we can once we're done finally if for whatever reason the stream buffers or
stops Don't Panic just refresh your browser or log back in and it should start
working okay with the housekeeping out of the way it's time to get into the science and we thought it would be a
good idea to start with a little introduction of who we are now if you've never heard of csro before that's okay
all you really need to know is that we are Australia's national science agency we have over 6,000 people who work at
CSO all over the country and we study pretty much everything from tiny little
bacteria to stars in galaxies Far Far Away in a nutshell it is our job to try
and understand how the world works and come up with new ideas to make Australia
a better place now again even if you've never heard of us before I promise you
have used something that we have invented a few of what I think are some of our greatest inventions include
things like arog guard bug spray that's pretty essential if you live in Australia plastic money we've
contributed to the discovery of vaccines and even the WiFi connection you are probably using right now to watch this
webcast was in part invented by syyro so lot of cool stuff coming out of syyro
all the time now of course one of the big projects that we're working on is what we're going to be talking about today which is the national koala
monitoring program which again is all about how we count koalas and work out where they
live now our team thought it might be fun to start off with a few of our absolute favorite koala facts and we
think one of the most important things everybody should know about koalas is that they need healthy Forest to survive
koalas live in eucalypt Forest they live up in the trees and their diet consists
of pretty much just one thing eucalyptus leaves so this means if we don't have
healthy forests the koalas won't have anywhere to live and they also won't
have anything to eat and what's interesting about their diet as well these leaves that they're eating is
eucalyptus leaves are typically poisonous for everything else so you definitely don't want to eat them but koalas have evolved to deal with the
toxins in eucalyptus leaves so they're one of the few species that can actually eat this thing now in case you're
wondering what they're doing all day up in those trees well the truth is I mean
not very much koalas actually spend most of their time sleeping they spend about
18 hours a day fast asleep up in those trees that's why if you have been lucky
enough to see a koala in the wild they're usually having a
snooze now coming back to what I was mentioning about eucalyptus leaves this brings us to another really important
fact about koalas which is that they're actually very picky eaters now I mentioned koalas eat the uh leaves of
eucalyptus trees but there's actually 700 different types of eucalyptus trees
across the country and koalas only eat the leaves from about 30 or 40 of these
so they quite picky not only that they will also often choose to eat the leaves at the top of the tree because these
tend to be more nutritious so I know when you see a koala munching down like this one gobbling up everything in sight
it looks like it'll just eat anything that it finds that's green but in fact they have very particular
tastes the other thing that is important to know about koalas is that they're not
the type of animal to get together with their friends and family and share a big meal of those eucalyptus leaves koalas
are actually highly solitary creatures this means that they are not very social
and prefer to live alone koalas are what we call territorial which means they
have their own area of the forest and their own trees that they like to live in and spend their time in and they
absolutely do not want to share now what this means is if you ever encounter a koala in the wild
I know they look really cute and cuddly I spend a lot of my work day just looking at photos of koalas I know how
cute they are but you definitely don't want to give them a hug they will not
want you to touch them or or give them a cuddle and it can actually really stress them out if they interact too much with
people so unless the koala that you see is injured or in need of immediate help
you shouldn't touch them because it can really stress them
out all right this next little fact I want to share with you is probably one of my favorite funny things about koalas
that a lot of people don't know which is that compared to most other mammals oh
how do I put this nicely koalas have unusually small brains uh and I can show
you a picture of what a koala brain looks like so you can see they're they're pretty tiny and this is why
unfortunately a lot of people tend to say that they're not that smart if you're curious about exactly how small
their brain is it only weighs about 19 G which is roughly the same as four glass
marbles so the next time you are outside playing with marbles hold four of them in your hand and that's it that's all
there is to a koala brain but in the case of the koala having a small brain
can actually be a pretty bright idea because remember a koala's average day
doesn't have a lot going on they spend 18 to 20 hours asleep they
wake up to eat they wake up to poop and then they go back to sleep and that's pretty much their typical day and you
just don't need a big smart complex brain to do that kind of thing when
that's most of what you're doing when you're spending most of your time sleeping you just don't need a really complex BL brain excuse me that requires
a lot of energy so better to have a smaller brain that doesn't take as much energy to run
and the last thing I wanted to share with you is that although koalas do spend most of their time sleeping and
often tend to be Al alone they are still excellent mothers koala mothers give
their babies a pouch to live in and they feed them milk to help them go grow strong for the first six months of their
lives koala babies will live in their mother's pouch but eventually they get way too big and it's time to move out
but instead of fully moving out they just sort of climb onto their mother's back and hang out there for another 6
months so their poor mother has to climb up and down trees with a baby on their back after about a year the koala mother
is getting ready to have another baby and her first baby will start to become a lot more independent but in general
koala mothers are quite nurturing and protective and are just all around great moms all right now that our very big
complex brains are full of koala facts I'm going to hand the rest of this presentation over to Dr Andrew Hoskins
who is the leader of the national koala monitoring program here at syro and he's going to tell us more about how we count
koalas and all the cool technology we use to do that over to you
Andrew thanks Sam so how cool were some of those koala facts here at the national koala monitoring program we
really love KY koalas but we don't just do it for fun we do it so we can have the best possible information to support
koala conservation koalas are what we call an umbrella species which means that by protecting koalas we can also
protect all of the animals that live alongside them and depending on where you are can really change how many
koalas you might see did you know that Koalas in New South Wales Queensland and the ACT are actually endangered which
means that without our help these populations may go extinct and you can also find them in Victoria and South
Australia but these populations are doing okay in fact in some places in Southern Australia there are too too
many koalas can you IM imagine that so Sam already told you about how
koalas live in trees and eat eucalyp leaves and we were just learning that koalas live in the Eastern and Southern
parts of Australia but you may be thinking where can I find a koala in these areas so the map that you can see
here is where we at the national koala monitoring program think koalas are most likely to occur so those green areas are
where we really think there's quite a high probability that koalas live and those Bry pink areas are areas where we
think there's a much lower probability or we're uncertain that there's koalas living there but you could really
potentially find Koalas in any one of these areas you may also think that all
across the country koalas look the same but that's not actually true so koalas
up here in Northern Australia where Sam and I are calling from are much smaller and they're more adapted to managing the
hot environments that they live within so they're smaller they have shorter fur and smaller earss to help them or larger
ears sorry to help them remove heat the koalas down in Southern Australia are
larger and with denser fur and smaller hairs to help them conserve heat and stay warm in those cold
environments and we all probably know what a koala looks like right if you see
a koala you can identify it but can you see the koala in this picture
is there a koala there it's right here and this is one of the challenges when it comes to Counting koalas and for the
national koala monitoring program to develop the best understanding of how many koalas there are right across the
country it's that while koalas are really easy to recognize they can be actually quite hard to spot and count in
the wild so to help us get around that we use a whole bunch of different
Technologies and approaches to really understand where koalas are right around the country I'm going to talk to you now
about some of the different ways that we as scientists and you can help us look for koalas one of the first methods that we
can use to count koalas is we can look for the signs that the koalas leave behind so koalas leave scratches on
trees as they're climbing up the their trunks and they and we can find those scratches and know that a koala has been
there also even though the koalas are hiding high up in the trees when they poo that poo lands on the ground and we
can go around and we can find that poo and if we find that poo we know that there was a koala sleeping in the tree
and that koala did a bit of a poo and it landed on the ground one of the other ways that we can
look for koalas is we can spot them from the sky using drones so koalas are mammals it means they're warm-blooded
and it means that they're warmer than the environment that they're sitting in so we can use a drone to actually look
for those heat signatures of koalas and SP spot the warm koala sitting in the
relatively cooler tree and know that there's a koala there much better than we can with our own
eyes another way we can find koalas is we can actually listen to the boys when they're singing for the girls so during
the breeding season male koalas go out and they call for their girls to find try and find a mate and it's those calls
that we can find and record using sound recorders that we Le in the environment so I'm going to play you now a koala
call so you can hear what a boy koala sounds like when he's out there looking for one of his girls
so that that call that you can hear may not sound very very nice or pretty to us
but from in the koala world and in koala language that's a lovely singing voice
now one of the other ways that we can help count koalas and this is one of the ways that I we really want everybody on
this call and to help get get involved and help contribute information into the national koala monitoring program is we
can also spot them from the ground using our eyes so koalas may be hard to spot
but we can actually spot them and CSO and the national koala monitoring
program have developed the koala spotter app which you can get on your smartphones now and download and if you
see a koala in the wild while you're out there out there with your parents looking you can record that sighting and
send it directly to us and you'll know that that information has been used in
the best possible way we can to support koala conservation and help us get a better understanding of where koalas are
around the country how many koalas there are um right across the country as well
as how the koala populations within your local regions are changing through time
and that's one of the key pieces of information that we need to make better conservation decisions so recently we were out in the
Redlands coast region um testing out some of these different koala monitoring methods and we filmed a bit of a video
we thought we'd play that to you now so you can see what it's like to use some of these methods out in the
bush the national koala monitoring program is using the best technology and analytics to come up with the best
estimates we can of koala populations and distributions right around the country today we're here in the Redlands coast region and we're going to show you
some of the many ways that we look for koalas under the national koala monitoring program we can do this using
thermal drones looking for koalas from above or looking for koala poos using things like detection dogs we also use
acoustic recorders which let us hear Koalas in the environment or we can use our eyes and just walk around looking
for them and Counting them themselves we also have citizen science apps that we are able to use that let anybody come
out look for quas and spot them and bring that information back into the national qu monitoring program hi my name is Dr Roman christes
and um this is summer here and we are from detection dog for conservation at
the University of the Sunshine Coast so basically what they do is they help us find koala scats and through their scats
we know that koala live in the habitat and so we are really detecting and mapping koala habitat and then often we
also want to know Health koala's health and so for that we deploy what we call genetic detection dog and that dog take
us to the Very Fresh scat we collect the scats and we bring them back to the
lab yes goody so basically um we were searching the landscape for koala cats
and Austin got very excited and suddenly he drops and so that's his indication that he's got something so what I do
then I ask him to show me because it's still really hard to find a scat in that you know very complex litter and so he's
pointed the scat um with his nose and um here it is so with the national KOA monitoring
program we've been doing actually a lot of uh different method testing so we're really Keen to always know um the
strengths and limitation of the different Innovation that we do for koala conservation so from detection uh
using dog or acoustic recorder to density to health measure um all the
method have pros and cons and they have strengths and limitation and only by knowing that really well we'll be able
to select the best method and really get accurate that on koala we just have one of our koala coming down the tree and we
saw him before and there was quite a lot of birds activity and we potentially was
being harassed by the birds and please just and come down you can see that he's both got a collar and an a tag so the
color is so that we know its location through the landscape especially here there's a lot of houses there lot of
Roads we really want to know um how we can manage uh those safety so those little Bluetooth koala
air tag are really essential link uh between citizen scientist and koala conservation basically thanks to that
little tag people can report where koala are but also who is where so linking
each individual koala to their home range and which other koala are in their home range and sharing um that life with
them it's very critical because all that data enables government for instance to make decision on where to conserve uh
koala habitat and um it also is a way to train every one of us and to become
protector or guardians of our koala because we can learn how to recognize when a coral is sick and report it
through the app and then we can um get in touch through the app with local Wildlife Care and those people are
amazing uh citizen who come rescue KOA and bring them to hospital so they can get treated and release them back into
the wild the national koala monitoring program has created an app called koala
spotter which lets people record koala sightings no matter where they are so if you're out walking in town or on a
bushwalk or at the park and you spot a koala you can take a picture record your location and send that data to us the
data you collect using the app gets sent to our national koala sightings database and from there we use that information
to create maps of where they live how many koalas there are and also whether or not they're healthy we've
deliberately designed this app so that anybody no matter their age can use this and get out there and have some fun and
believe it or not most of the data that we've gotten through this app so far has come from family and kids who are just
out together on an adventure we're really trying to make sure we can look at all of the different monitoring
approaches and technologies that are out there for koalas and use them in a best practice way uh to allow us to to tell
that National story of the
koala all right everybody that more less brings us to the end of our planned
presentation um just wanted to say a very big thank you to the many many partners that are involved in the
National koala monitoring program science is very much a team sport
so you can see from this little slide all the different universities and agencies that uh we work with to collect
all of this data so none of what you see would be possible without a lot of teamwork all right so that moves us into
the part where we answer some of your koala questions so Andrew the very first one that we've got here is how many
babies will a koala have in their lifetime all right so so koalas can have
about one baby a year for a female koala and they can do that for about 10 years
so really on average in a in a female koala's lifetime they'll have about 10
babies awesome all right and there are a lot of questions I
can see here about what koalas eat so we're going to have a few questions about about their diet um I guess the
first thing they want to know is how much uh do koalas eat each day we talked
about they only eat eucalyptus leaves so how much of those leaves do they need to eat each day to
survive um so was that how much they need to eat to survive yeah they wanted
to know in in terms of weight I guess maybe you don't have to count the number of individual
leaves I I I wouldn't I wouldn't guess it individual leaves just because depending on how big the leaves are will
really change how many leaves a koala koala could eat but eucalyptus leaves are uh you know there's not a much not
much energy in a eucalyptus leaf for a koala so they have to eat quite a few and it's somewhere around 300 to 500
gram of eucalyptus leaves every day that a koala needs to eat to survive and when you think about how
much time they're spending sleeping that means most of the time that they're awake they've just got to be eating to
get all that food yeah it's it's it's a pretty you know average day for them
sleep eat sleep eat that's basically what they do most of the time oh my gosh there's a lot of questions here so
sticking with the questions about uh what they eat um Are there specific
types of trees that they like more than others this is one of the really cool
things about koalas so yeah there are specific types of eucalyptus trees that koalas prefer over others but it really
depends on the area that you're in so just like us individual koalas and
individual populations of koalas prefer different types of food so some areas
koalas will like to eat one tree but in another area they may not eat that tree and they may prefer to eat another it's
this really interesting complex relationship that you wouldn't necessarily expect from an animal that
browes on just leaves yeah absolutely all right oh I can see we've
only got five minutes so let's get through as many of these as we can so sticking with the food there's so many
questions about food um how long does it take cuz we talked about how um eucalypt
leaves are poisonous for most people so if you you know don't eat them if you're watching this don't go out and be like a
koala and eat eucalyptus leaves that's a bad idea but how long does it take them to digest a big meal of leaves yeah it
it can take quite a while because leaves are quite hard to digest right like even
if eucalyptus leaves weren't poisonous can you imagine like eating a handful of like these hard sort of Woody leaves um
and then trying to digest those so for koalas to do that they need to chew them up really really good and get them
really really small and then swallow them and it takes quite a long time for their guts to digest them it can take up
to about 4 days from a S one meal to move through a koala before it PS it out and it lands on the
ground that is a really long time that is really long time for a meal so there's also some questions about
counting koalas and um there's a year three class that would like to know how
many koalas there are out there with collars on them like we saw in the video look it really depends on the
region that you're in so the area that we're in in the Redlands Coast there's
maybe and I'm probably going to get the number wrong here so there there's probably about 8 or 10 koalas at the
moment that are colored but then there's areas in New South Wales where CED quite a large number of koalas as well and it
depends on the scientific study that the individual groups are doing to understand their movement so it's one of
those questions that yet it really depends on where you are and you know
which group is working on them and what are the questions that they're trying to answer well following on from that this
isn't a surprising question um and a really important one which is how many
koalas are actually out there Andrew do we know yeah so we have an estimate of
how many koalas there are out there nationally and this is one of the biggest challenges cuz as we told you they're really hard to count in the wild
and they they're ranged across a really broad area so we need the best available
information we can at a really large scale before we can get a really good estimate at the moment we're estimating
that nationally there's between 224 and 524,000 right across the country as more
and more of your sightings from koala spotter start to come in we can help refine that estimate and get our counts
much more precise and that's what we're trying to do every single day right the whole big
team of us working on that question it's a really good question that we're still trying to answer so this kind of relates to this I
think this is a really good one too it's really important is how are people impacting koala
populations there's a whole range of ways that people are impacting koala population so koalas have to live in
trees they have to eat eucalyp to live and a lot of the activities that we do
to help humans live and humans survive like grow food and and um you know make
places for us to live means we have to clear those trees and loss of those trees means that koalas run out of the
places to live other ways is koalas like to live in areas that people like to
live in so there are some really prominent Urban koala popul
and in those areas koalas come into contact with people also their dogs
quite frequently so dogs can attack koalas so your your dog in your backyard
if you're an area with koalas it could attack a koala injur it there's and koalas also in these urban areas need to
Cross Roads because those roads pass through all of their different habitat and they can get hit by cars which again
can really impact koala populations yes there's a lot of different ways that humans and koalas
interact that we need to be aware of for sure now this is a fun one cuz we were
going to talk about this in our original uh presentation and we we ran out of time but um there's some students who
would like to know whether or not koalas drink water and if they do where do they get it
from so koalas don't drink water or they don't observe to drink water that
frequently and a lot of their moisture that that they get comes from the leaves
that they eat but it's not that they don't drink water all the time so they can drink water in a number of different
ways they can drink water out of pools of water that are pooling in the trees so in the forks of the trees and they
can drink water as it runs down the bark of the trees or they might need to if if there there's no other water available
come down out of the tree and find a water source to drink from but again
really koalas get the majority of their water from the leaves that they eat and some of these other ways that they drink
is really to help supplement their water when it's you know it's a dry time maybe in summer and it's not raining that
much and is it ever a good idea to uh give a koala water from a bottle
Andrew it's look it looks great and we've you know we've probably all seen some of the videos about giving koala
koalas water from a bottle but you have to be really really careful so if you need to give koala water and you're in a
situation where there is a dehydrated and thirsty koala give it a bowl of water to drink from because by pouring
it out of the bottle you could accidentally drown the koala cuz what happens is the koala breathes in the
water as it's coming down the bottle and that can really hurt the koala and possibly kill it yep so we've got to be very careful
when we're trying to help all right I'm I think we've got about one more minute so I don't know if
there's going to be classes uh logging off and there's dozens of questions that unfortunately we just can't get to them
all um but there are resources for teachers they can reach out to to our program and we can try to answer those
questions uh later on after the webcast so make note of your questions and feel free to send them to us I think I want
to make sure I get this this one in for for you Andrew um which is you've been working on koalas for quite a long time
now is there something that you have learned or discovered about koalas that
you have just thought that's amazing and what a cool thing about about this species
that's a really good question so look I think one of the most amazing things
about koalas is just how adaptable they are to the different environments that
we find them in so they they're all over the place and when we start to look we
find more and more so you know they can be found you know right up here in North
Queensland in really remote areas that are quite dry and hot and then you get them all the way down in Victoria where
and South Australia where it's cold cold wet and rainy and koalas have evolved
and adapted over the years to really live and survive in all of these different environments and I think
that's super cool because you don't get many animals that can survive across such a wide range of
areas okay so I think we're going to be I wanted to make sure we got that one in um before any students had to to log off
um but we do have a few for minutes quite a few people have been asking so I'll try and get to many of these as as
we can before um the students have to go um quite a few students have been asking
how long do Calas live yes so in the W koalas can live for
about 10 to 15 years so they're pretty long live probably about about as long
as people's dogs really yeah yeah that's a good comparison let's see there's so many
questions to go through oh a few people are wondering how big the koalas can get
we talked about how there's differences between North and South but I think a few of the students would like to know
just how big they can get yeah so there are differences between north and south
and there one of those is body size um koalas can they can range somewhere
between well it's quite a wide range they can range between four and 15 kilos so some of the big male koalas can get
up to 15 kilos which is it's a pretty heavy koala what's that in dog dog terms that's like a labrador SI size dog
that's about the size of my my toddler and I can tell you when I've got to pick her up off the ground it's pretty heavy
that's about the size of of a three-year-old my
three-year-old all right oh a few people would like to know whether or not koalas can swim they
can so yeah there um a lot of animals can swim that you wouldn't expect and
koala is a one of them so that yeah they can swim when they need to but they
don't like to swim right just looking through some of these
questions oh a few people were wondering we got to listen to the boy koala
singing to the girl what does it sound like if the girl thinks that sounds very
attractive and would like to answer back the girls do call but they don't necessarily sing back to the boys so the
girls also have their own vocalizations and koalas can communicate to each other vocalizing boy calls are really deep
kind of like people boy calls are really deep and then the girls are a much um higher pitched call and a a bit
squeakier yeah it's a pretty high pitched sound isn't it it's a pretty high pitched squeal actually yes I'm
sure if the teachers um did a little uh Googling they could find a video that shows you what that sound looks like it
can be pretty deafening and if you're in the bush and you heard a male or a female koala without knowing what they
are art you'd probably be pretty frightened wouldn't you like they're they're yes they're quite extreme from a
human perspective well I grew up in Canada and the first time I heard uh a possum which
has a very similar kind of growl in a tree I got a little bit scared I didn't know what it was so yeah I think if you
didn't know it was a koala you might you might get a little a little frightened so obviously the kids are
often seeing in the news sometimes that koalas are not well and they see Koalas in videos that that need help some of
them would like to know what what do you do if you see a koala in a tree or maybe on the ground and it doesn't look very
well y so um the first thing to do
yourself I wouldn't approach the koala and I wouldn't try to handle the koala because a sick and injured koala can you
know in tryo it's frightened it's really scared and in you know because it's scared it could try to defend itself and
you might get hurt but what you can do is look up of your local Care organizations so you can call call
places like wies or any other local koala Care Organization and they'll send a carer
out who can come and do an assessment on that koala if it needs to go into care
and be rehabilitated then they'll be the ones who are able to catch it and bring it into care and take care of it before
releasing it again absolutely you need very specialist training to handle animals in
the wild and it really depends on the animal as well the training that you need and um you and I have seen koala
claws up close plenty of times you do not want to mess with a koala those those claws are pretty sharp uh they're
designed for climbing but yeah they're SHP designed for climbing but when
they're scared they'll they'll use them to protect themselves so you have to be careful
absolutely all right oh here's a good one um one one that we've talked about
actually recently you and I what types of predators do koalas have to deal with
ah that is a really good one so there's a couple of different natural predators
that koalas have to deal with and it really again it really depends on where you are in the country and what what
other animals are in the area so dingos dingo are one of those natural predators and they'll either a they'll capture and
Hunt koalas when they're on the ground uh some of the other animals that can get them is you you'd be surprised
particularly some of some of those people down in Southern Australia but further north carpet snakes carpet
snakes can eat quite a large number of koalas up in a tree other things like
large birds of prey can get them as well so wedgetail Eagles are able to get them so it's really those Predators those
large predators that can can handle an animal as big as a koala and that's where their camouflage
is so important because that's they're hiding from when they're up in those trees so sometimes it's tough for us
because we need to go out and spot these koalas and it's like oh I wish these were easier to find but they are trying
to hide from all those predators that might be trying to get them all right here's another one that
that I think is a really important one U do koalas carry viruses yes um all animals carry viruses
actually so just just like people just like any other animals koalas can carry
viruses as well and a range of other diseases so those viruses and diseases
can negatively impact koalas just like they can negatively impact people and
one of the challenges for um koala populations is when they're under a whole bunch of other pressures so
there's things like when they're losing their habitat or maybe animals are getting hit by cars or they don't have
enough leaves to eat those sorts of things then the impact that these viruses and these other and these
diseases can have on koalas and koala populations gets increased and magnified that one of the biggest challenges with
koala health is it's it's the the combined impact of all of these
different things that means you know what might have been just a a cold for a koala before turns that cold into
something that's a lot worse you know and and that really impacts the
koala there's a few questions here about the technology that we use as well
there's a couple questions here about drones so I'm assuming there's a few people out there who who may have drones
themselves or or or get to use them they are they can be a lot of fun um one person was wondering do we have pilots
who who fly them live and manually steer them or do they get pre-programmed and
they just follow a specific route that we set both actually so it it depends on
who's doing the survey so we try to survey use the drones to survey a specific area most of the time flying in
a lawn mower patent so you can pre-program the Drone or you can manually fly it to go up and down and
record the area that you're looking for what we do is we have the pilots then on the ground who are then looking at the
the video feed that's coming from the Drone to identify when they potentially see a koala there's a lot of work going
on in the background at the moment to you know use some of the latest artificial intelligence algorithms to
help us automatically identify koalas from drones but we you know teams are still working on that challenge so at
the moment the best way that people are really using drones is they're manually flying them or they're sort of between
manual and automatic they're letting the Drone fly an automatic path but they're watching it manually to then take
control of the Drone and inspect to see if that what looks like a koala hot blob is actually a koala and even drones
aren't perfect at spotting koalas I think a really good example which was sent to us from one of our collaborator collaborators just yesterday so they've
been out flying drones in North Queensland uh looking for koalas and unfortunately they didn't find anywhere
they were looking but they show me some really really good examples of when some things may look like a koala from a
thermal drone and it's really not one of those ones was a are these um aboral
termite Mounds so you can get termites up in the trees and it's a it's a blob of a nest of termites that are sitting
there and through the thermal drone that looks a lot like a koala like that's the same sort of shape and size sitting in
the same sort of places of the trees so it can be a really tough challenge even when you're using something like a
drone well this is actually um leads us very nicely into another question
someone had which is do you know if syyro uses drones to see other things do we use drones to look at other animals
we use drones for a whole range of different things um so we use drones to
look at the distribution of weeds so both in the environment as well as in our agricultural zones we use drones to
look at the health of crops so we can use them to fly them around and look at the health of crops we've also used them
in some of these more remote places in Northern Australia to look for things like buffal or feral pigs um so there's
a whole wide range of different ways we can use drones and we do use drones to
help help us in our everyday work another really cool example that I think
is um some teams use them to better understand the health of water holes or
bongs up here in Northern Australia so they can map out these bab bongs regularly to better understand the
condition of those and how those bongs are changing through time all right so we're g to have to
wrap up soon so I think it would be good to answer a couple questions about how to use the app because there's there are
a few of those one question I've got two that I think are good one question is what what should we do how do we tell if
there's a joey in the pouch and what do we do how do we Market if we do see a
mother koala with her baby how do we record that in the app so it can be
quite hard to tell if there's a joey in the pouch and we don't expect people to you know give us with certainty that
they've seen seen a joey in the pouch so you've really got to look for that that moving bulge when the Joey is getting
bigger or even making sure that you can see the Joey poking its head out head out of the pouch in the koala spotter
app there's a number of questions you can answer about the koala and one of those is does it have a joey what we
recommend is there's three options there's yes there's no and those are if you're certain I you're certain that
there wasn't a Joey or yes you saw a Joey and you can record it there's also I'm unsure if you're not sure just click
unsure and that's really good information for us we click that button a lot don't we
because sometime it's very hard to tell when they're very high up in the tree it's very hard to tell all right the
last question and again I am so sorry I can see there are tons more I did my best to get through as many as possible
um to all of the teachers if if the students are really Keen please feel free to contact the National qu quala
monitoring program and myself and Andrew or another member of the team we promise we will find those answers for you uh
but the last one I think really good to ask about the app is what does someone do if they're walking around and they're
looking for a coala but they happen to see another rare animal do we want them
to record that as well absolutely so while koala spotter is called koala Spotter and we really want
you to spot koalas we really want you to record whatever other animals you see as well so you can record and well hit a
record and say it's not a koala leave us a note and say that you've seen something else and our teams in the
background will find that and will make sure that it's labeled to something that's not a koala so one thing you can
really be confident in is whenever you're sending information through the while spotter app we've always got teams
that are looking on that data as it's coming through and making sure that we can validate and answer any questions or
concerns that were they raised about that sighting that's right we're very careful
when the data comes in we check it we recheck it we check it a third time to make sure that that uh those sightings
are all right um and we're not mixing up uh different animals that people have recorded for sure all right everybody
again I am so sorry I I'm so happy to see all of these amazing questions on my
screen I'm so glad that everybody was interested and engaged that's wonderful for us we were so happy to talk to you
about this today but sadly we are out of time so we do need to wrap up uh as I
say please submit any questions that we didn't get to we will definitely uh get back to you as soon as we can with our
answers and just a huge thank you to everybody who helped put this together
all of our amazing partners with the program and of course on behalf of Andrew and myself thanks everybody for
coming in thanks all it's been really great talking to you
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all right hello everybody and welcome to our celebration of national science week
2024 here at CSIRO my name is Dr Samantha Monroe and I am an ecologist
here at cro and I am also your host for today's webcast now when we found out
that this year's theme for National Science week was species survival we absolutely knew we wanted to put
something together to reach out to schools on this really important topic currently there are 1,700 different
species all across Australia that are threatened with Extinction so this is a really big problem that we all need to
work together to solve now today we're going to be talking about one of the species that might be in a bit of
trouble and that is of course our amazing and iconic koala today we want to talk to you about a program we have
at CSIRO that's been created to count koalas work out how many koalas there
actually are in Australia and also where they live this program is called the national koala monitoring program we're
also going to talk to you about how you can help us count koalas and become of a bit a bit of a scientist yourself and at
the end you will get a chance to ask us some of your best koala
questions now before we get started it is really important to acknowledge that we are all coming together today from
many different parts of the country so I would like to begin by acknowledging the bindle and w garoo people who are the
traditional owners of the land that I am speaking from today up in North Queensland and pay my respects to their
Elders past present and emerging a couple quick housekeeping
notes for everyone if for whatever reason you can't hear me right now you have clicked the muted button so you're
going to want to unmute me that controls how whether or not you can hear me not whether or not I can hear you you can
also control the volume of today's presentation and add close captioning using the options at the bottom of the
screen now as I mentioned you will be able to ask some ask some koala questions at the end and you can submit
these using a Q&A function on the side of your screen you should see a little chat icon with a question mark over it
click on that and a panel will open up where you can submit your questions and feel free to do this throughout the
presentation and we'll get to as many as we can once we're done finally if for whatever reason the stream buffers or
stops Don't Panic just refresh your browser or log back in and it should start
working okay with the housekeeping out of the way it's time to get into the science and we thought it would be a
good idea to start with a little introduction of who we are now if you've never heard of csro before that's okay
all you really need to know is that we are Australia's national science agency we have over 6,000 people who work at
CSO all over the country and we study pretty much everything from tiny little
bacteria to stars in galaxies Far Far Away in a nutshell it is our job to try
and understand how the world works and come up with new ideas to make Australia
a better place now again even if you've never heard of us before I promise you
have used something that we have invented a few of what I think are some of our greatest inventions include
things like arog guard bug spray that's pretty essential if you live in Australia plastic money we've
contributed to the discovery of vaccines and even the WiFi connection you are probably using right now to watch this
webcast was in part invented by syyro so lot of cool stuff coming out of syyro
all the time now of course one of the big projects that we're working on is what we're going to be talking about today which is the national koala
monitoring program which again is all about how we count koalas and work out where they
live now our team thought it might be fun to start off with a few of our absolute favorite koala facts and we
think one of the most important things everybody should know about koalas is that they need healthy Forest to survive
koalas live in eucalypt Forest they live up in the trees and their diet consists
of pretty much just one thing eucalyptus leaves so this means if we don't have
healthy forests the koalas won't have anywhere to live and they also won't
have anything to eat and what's interesting about their diet as well these leaves that they're eating is
eucalyptus leaves are typically poisonous for everything else so you definitely don't want to eat them but koalas have evolved to deal with the
toxins in eucalyptus leaves so they're one of the few species that can actually eat this thing now in case you're
wondering what they're doing all day up in those trees well the truth is I mean
not very much koalas actually spend most of their time sleeping they spend about
18 hours a day fast asleep up in those trees that's why if you have been lucky
enough to see a koala in the wild they're usually having a
snooze now coming back to what I was mentioning about eucalyptus leaves this brings us to another really important
fact about koalas which is that they're actually very picky eaters now I mentioned koalas eat the uh leaves of
eucalyptus trees but there's actually 700 different types of eucalyptus trees
across the country and koalas only eat the leaves from about 30 or 40 of these
so they quite picky not only that they will also often choose to eat the leaves at the top of the tree because these
tend to be more nutritious so I know when you see a koala munching down like this one gobbling up everything in sight
it looks like it'll just eat anything that it finds that's green but in fact they have very particular
tastes the other thing that is important to know about koalas is that they're not
the type of animal to get together with their friends and family and share a big meal of those eucalyptus leaves koalas
are actually highly solitary creatures this means that they are not very social
and prefer to live alone koalas are what we call territorial which means they
have their own area of the forest and their own trees that they like to live in and spend their time in and they
absolutely do not want to share now what this means is if you ever encounter a koala in the wild
I know they look really cute and cuddly I spend a lot of my work day just looking at photos of koalas I know how
cute they are but you definitely don't want to give them a hug they will not
want you to touch them or or give them a cuddle and it can actually really stress them out if they interact too much with
people so unless the koala that you see is injured or in need of immediate help
you shouldn't touch them because it can really stress them
out all right this next little fact I want to share with you is probably one of my favorite funny things about koalas
that a lot of people don't know which is that compared to most other mammals oh
how do I put this nicely koalas have unusually small brains uh and I can show
you a picture of what a koala brain looks like so you can see they're they're pretty tiny and this is why
unfortunately a lot of people tend to say that they're not that smart if you're curious about exactly how small
their brain is it only weighs about 19 G which is roughly the same as four glass
marbles so the next time you are outside playing with marbles hold four of them in your hand and that's it that's all
there is to a koala brain but in the case of the koala having a small brain
can actually be a pretty bright idea because remember a koala's average day
doesn't have a lot going on they spend 18 to 20 hours asleep they
wake up to eat they wake up to poop and then they go back to sleep and that's pretty much their typical day and you
just don't need a big smart complex brain to do that kind of thing when
that's most of what you're doing when you're spending most of your time sleeping you just don't need a really complex BL brain excuse me that requires
a lot of energy so better to have a smaller brain that doesn't take as much energy to run
and the last thing I wanted to share with you is that although koalas do spend most of their time sleeping and
often tend to be Al alone they are still excellent mothers koala mothers give
their babies a pouch to live in and they feed them milk to help them go grow strong for the first six months of their
lives koala babies will live in their mother's pouch but eventually they get way too big and it's time to move out
but instead of fully moving out they just sort of climb onto their mother's back and hang out there for another 6
months so their poor mother has to climb up and down trees with a baby on their back after about a year the koala mother
is getting ready to have another baby and her first baby will start to become a lot more independent but in general
koala mothers are quite nurturing and protective and are just all around great moms all right now that our very big
complex brains are full of koala facts I'm going to hand the rest of this presentation over to Dr Andrew Hoskins
who is the leader of the national koala monitoring program here at syro and he's going to tell us more about how we count
koalas and all the cool technology we use to do that over to you
Andrew thanks Sam so how cool were some of those koala facts here at the national koala monitoring program we
really love KY koalas but we don't just do it for fun we do it so we can have the best possible information to support
koala conservation koalas are what we call an umbrella species which means that by protecting koalas we can also
protect all of the animals that live alongside them and depending on where you are can really change how many
koalas you might see did you know that Koalas in New South Wales Queensland and the ACT are actually endangered which
means that without our help these populations may go extinct and you can also find them in Victoria and South
Australia but these populations are doing okay in fact in some places in Southern Australia there are too too
many koalas can you IM imagine that so Sam already told you about how
koalas live in trees and eat eucalyp leaves and we were just learning that koalas live in the Eastern and Southern
parts of Australia but you may be thinking where can I find a koala in these areas so the map that you can see
here is where we at the national koala monitoring program think koalas are most likely to occur so those green areas are
where we really think there's quite a high probability that koalas live and those Bry pink areas are areas where we
think there's a much lower probability or we're uncertain that there's koalas living there but you could really
potentially find Koalas in any one of these areas you may also think that all
across the country koalas look the same but that's not actually true so koalas
up here in Northern Australia where Sam and I are calling from are much smaller and they're more adapted to managing the
hot environments that they live within so they're smaller they have shorter fur and smaller earss to help them or larger
ears sorry to help them remove heat the koalas down in Southern Australia are
larger and with denser fur and smaller hairs to help them conserve heat and stay warm in those cold
environments and we all probably know what a koala looks like right if you see
a koala you can identify it but can you see the koala in this picture
is there a koala there it's right here and this is one of the challenges when it comes to Counting koalas and for the
national koala monitoring program to develop the best understanding of how many koalas there are right across the
country it's that while koalas are really easy to recognize they can be actually quite hard to spot and count in
the wild so to help us get around that we use a whole bunch of different
Technologies and approaches to really understand where koalas are right around the country I'm going to talk to you now
about some of the different ways that we as scientists and you can help us look for koalas one of the first methods that we
can use to count koalas is we can look for the signs that the koalas leave behind so koalas leave scratches on
trees as they're climbing up the their trunks and they and we can find those scratches and know that a koala has been
there also even though the koalas are hiding high up in the trees when they poo that poo lands on the ground and we
can go around and we can find that poo and if we find that poo we know that there was a koala sleeping in the tree
and that koala did a bit of a poo and it landed on the ground one of the other ways that we can
look for koalas is we can spot them from the sky using drones so koalas are mammals it means they're warm-blooded
and it means that they're warmer than the environment that they're sitting in so we can use a drone to actually look
for those heat signatures of koalas and SP spot the warm koala sitting in the
relatively cooler tree and know that there's a koala there much better than we can with our own
eyes another way we can find koalas is we can actually listen to the boys when they're singing for the girls so during
the breeding season male koalas go out and they call for their girls to find try and find a mate and it's those calls
that we can find and record using sound recorders that we Le in the environment so I'm going to play you now a koala
call so you can hear what a boy koala sounds like when he's out there looking for one of his girls
so that that call that you can hear may not sound very very nice or pretty to us
but from in the koala world and in koala language that's a lovely singing voice
now one of the other ways that we can help count koalas and this is one of the ways that I we really want everybody on
this call and to help get get involved and help contribute information into the national koala monitoring program is we
can also spot them from the ground using our eyes so koalas may be hard to spot
but we can actually spot them and CSO and the national koala monitoring
program have developed the koala spotter app which you can get on your smartphones now and download and if you
see a koala in the wild while you're out there out there with your parents looking you can record that sighting and
send it directly to us and you'll know that that information has been used in
the best possible way we can to support koala conservation and help us get a better understanding of where koalas are
around the country how many koalas there are um right across the country as well
as how the koala populations within your local regions are changing through time
and that's one of the key pieces of information that we need to make better conservation decisions so recently we were out in the
Redlands coast region um testing out some of these different koala monitoring methods and we filmed a bit of a video
we thought we'd play that to you now so you can see what it's like to use some of these methods out in the
bush the national koala monitoring program is using the best technology and analytics to come up with the best
estimates we can of koala populations and distributions right around the country today we're here in the Redlands coast region and we're going to show you
some of the many ways that we look for koalas under the national koala monitoring program we can do this using
thermal drones looking for koalas from above or looking for koala poos using things like detection dogs we also use
acoustic recorders which let us hear Koalas in the environment or we can use our eyes and just walk around looking
for them and Counting them themselves we also have citizen science apps that we are able to use that let anybody come
out look for quas and spot them and bring that information back into the national qu monitoring program hi my name is Dr Roman christes
and um this is summer here and we are from detection dog for conservation at
the University of the Sunshine Coast so basically what they do is they help us find koala scats and through their scats
we know that koala live in the habitat and so we are really detecting and mapping koala habitat and then often we
also want to know Health koala's health and so for that we deploy what we call genetic detection dog and that dog take
us to the Very Fresh scat we collect the scats and we bring them back to the
lab yes goody so basically um we were searching the landscape for koala cats
and Austin got very excited and suddenly he drops and so that's his indication that he's got something so what I do
then I ask him to show me because it's still really hard to find a scat in that you know very complex litter and so he's
pointed the scat um with his nose and um here it is so with the national KOA monitoring
program we've been doing actually a lot of uh different method testing so we're really Keen to always know um the
strengths and limitation of the different Innovation that we do for koala conservation so from detection uh
using dog or acoustic recorder to density to health measure um all the
method have pros and cons and they have strengths and limitation and only by knowing that really well we'll be able
to select the best method and really get accurate that on koala we just have one of our koala coming down the tree and we
saw him before and there was quite a lot of birds activity and we potentially was
being harassed by the birds and please just and come down you can see that he's both got a collar and an a tag so the
color is so that we know its location through the landscape especially here there's a lot of houses there lot of
Roads we really want to know um how we can manage uh those safety so those little Bluetooth koala
air tag are really essential link uh between citizen scientist and koala conservation basically thanks to that
little tag people can report where koala are but also who is where so linking
each individual koala to their home range and which other koala are in their home range and sharing um that life with
them it's very critical because all that data enables government for instance to make decision on where to conserve uh
koala habitat and um it also is a way to train every one of us and to become
protector or guardians of our koala because we can learn how to recognize when a coral is sick and report it
through the app and then we can um get in touch through the app with local Wildlife Care and those people are
amazing uh citizen who come rescue KOA and bring them to hospital so they can get treated and release them back into
the wild the national koala monitoring program has created an app called koala
spotter which lets people record koala sightings no matter where they are so if you're out walking in town or on a
bushwalk or at the park and you spot a koala you can take a picture record your location and send that data to us the
data you collect using the app gets sent to our national koala sightings database and from there we use that information
to create maps of where they live how many koalas there are and also whether or not they're healthy we've
deliberately designed this app so that anybody no matter their age can use this and get out there and have some fun and
believe it or not most of the data that we've gotten through this app so far has come from family and kids who are just
out together on an adventure we're really trying to make sure we can look at all of the different monitoring
approaches and technologies that are out there for koalas and use them in a best practice way uh to allow us to to tell
that National story of the
koala all right everybody that more less brings us to the end of our planned
presentation um just wanted to say a very big thank you to the many many partners that are involved in the
National koala monitoring program science is very much a team sport
so you can see from this little slide all the different universities and agencies that uh we work with to collect
all of this data so none of what you see would be possible without a lot of teamwork all right so that moves us into
the part where we answer some of your koala questions so Andrew the very first one that we've got here is how many
babies will a koala have in their lifetime all right so so koalas can have
about one baby a year for a female koala and they can do that for about 10 years
so really on average in a in a female koala's lifetime they'll have about 10
babies awesome all right and there are a lot of questions I
can see here about what koalas eat so we're going to have a few questions about about their diet um I guess the
first thing they want to know is how much uh do koalas eat each day we talked
about they only eat eucalyptus leaves so how much of those leaves do they need to eat each day to
survive um so was that how much they need to eat to survive yeah they wanted
to know in in terms of weight I guess maybe you don't have to count the number of individual
leaves I I I wouldn't I wouldn't guess it individual leaves just because depending on how big the leaves are will
really change how many leaves a koala koala could eat but eucalyptus leaves are uh you know there's not a much not
much energy in a eucalyptus leaf for a koala so they have to eat quite a few and it's somewhere around 300 to 500
gram of eucalyptus leaves every day that a koala needs to eat to survive and when you think about how
much time they're spending sleeping that means most of the time that they're awake they've just got to be eating to
get all that food yeah it's it's it's a pretty you know average day for them
sleep eat sleep eat that's basically what they do most of the time oh my gosh there's a lot of questions here so
sticking with the questions about uh what they eat um Are there specific
types of trees that they like more than others this is one of the really cool
things about koalas so yeah there are specific types of eucalyptus trees that koalas prefer over others but it really
depends on the area that you're in so just like us individual koalas and
individual populations of koalas prefer different types of food so some areas
koalas will like to eat one tree but in another area they may not eat that tree and they may prefer to eat another it's
this really interesting complex relationship that you wouldn't necessarily expect from an animal that
browes on just leaves yeah absolutely all right oh I can see we've
only got five minutes so let's get through as many of these as we can so sticking with the food there's so many
questions about food um how long does it take cuz we talked about how um eucalypt
leaves are poisonous for most people so if you you know don't eat them if you're watching this don't go out and be like a
koala and eat eucalyptus leaves that's a bad idea but how long does it take them to digest a big meal of leaves yeah it
it can take quite a while because leaves are quite hard to digest right like even
if eucalyptus leaves weren't poisonous can you imagine like eating a handful of like these hard sort of Woody leaves um
and then trying to digest those so for koalas to do that they need to chew them up really really good and get them
really really small and then swallow them and it takes quite a long time for their guts to digest them it can take up
to about 4 days from a S one meal to move through a koala before it PS it out and it lands on the
ground that is a really long time that is really long time for a meal so there's also some questions about
counting koalas and um there's a year three class that would like to know how
many koalas there are out there with collars on them like we saw in the video look it really depends on the
region that you're in so the area that we're in in the Redlands Coast there's
maybe and I'm probably going to get the number wrong here so there there's probably about 8 or 10 koalas at the
moment that are colored but then there's areas in New South Wales where CED quite a large number of koalas as well and it
depends on the scientific study that the individual groups are doing to understand their movement so it's one of
those questions that yet it really depends on where you are and you know
which group is working on them and what are the questions that they're trying to answer well following on from that this
isn't a surprising question um and a really important one which is how many
koalas are actually out there Andrew do we know yeah so we have an estimate of
how many koalas there are out there nationally and this is one of the biggest challenges cuz as we told you they're really hard to count in the wild
and they they're ranged across a really broad area so we need the best available
information we can at a really large scale before we can get a really good estimate at the moment we're estimating
that nationally there's between 224 and 524,000 right across the country as more
and more of your sightings from koala spotter start to come in we can help refine that estimate and get our counts
much more precise and that's what we're trying to do every single day right the whole big
team of us working on that question it's a really good question that we're still trying to answer so this kind of relates to this I
think this is a really good one too it's really important is how are people impacting koala
populations there's a whole range of ways that people are impacting koala population so koalas have to live in
trees they have to eat eucalyp to live and a lot of the activities that we do
to help humans live and humans survive like grow food and and um you know make
places for us to live means we have to clear those trees and loss of those trees means that koalas run out of the
places to live other ways is koalas like to live in areas that people like to
live in so there are some really prominent Urban koala popul
and in those areas koalas come into contact with people also their dogs
quite frequently so dogs can attack koalas so your your dog in your backyard
if you're an area with koalas it could attack a koala injur it there's and koalas also in these urban areas need to
Cross Roads because those roads pass through all of their different habitat and they can get hit by cars which again
can really impact koala populations yes there's a lot of different ways that humans and koalas
interact that we need to be aware of for sure now this is a fun one cuz we were
going to talk about this in our original uh presentation and we we ran out of time but um there's some students who
would like to know whether or not koalas drink water and if they do where do they get it
from so koalas don't drink water or they don't observe to drink water that
frequently and a lot of their moisture that that they get comes from the leaves
that they eat but it's not that they don't drink water all the time so they can drink water in a number of different
ways they can drink water out of pools of water that are pooling in the trees so in the forks of the trees and they
can drink water as it runs down the bark of the trees or they might need to if if there there's no other water available
come down out of the tree and find a water source to drink from but again
really koalas get the majority of their water from the leaves that they eat and some of these other ways that they drink
is really to help supplement their water when it's you know it's a dry time maybe in summer and it's not raining that
much and is it ever a good idea to uh give a koala water from a bottle
Andrew it's look it looks great and we've you know we've probably all seen some of the videos about giving koala
koalas water from a bottle but you have to be really really careful so if you need to give koala water and you're in a
situation where there is a dehydrated and thirsty koala give it a bowl of water to drink from because by pouring
it out of the bottle you could accidentally drown the koala cuz what happens is the koala breathes in the
water as it's coming down the bottle and that can really hurt the koala and possibly kill it yep so we've got to be very careful
when we're trying to help all right I'm I think we've got about one more minute so I don't know if
there's going to be classes uh logging off and there's dozens of questions that unfortunately we just can't get to them
all um but there are resources for teachers they can reach out to to our program and we can try to answer those
questions uh later on after the webcast so make note of your questions and feel free to send them to us I think I want
to make sure I get this this one in for for you Andrew um which is you've been working on koalas for quite a long time
now is there something that you have learned or discovered about koalas that
you have just thought that's amazing and what a cool thing about about this species
that's a really good question so look I think one of the most amazing things
about koalas is just how adaptable they are to the different environments that
we find them in so they they're all over the place and when we start to look we
find more and more so you know they can be found you know right up here in North
Queensland in really remote areas that are quite dry and hot and then you get them all the way down in Victoria where
and South Australia where it's cold cold wet and rainy and koalas have evolved
and adapted over the years to really live and survive in all of these different environments and I think
that's super cool because you don't get many animals that can survive across such a wide range of
areas okay so I think we're going to be I wanted to make sure we got that one in um before any students had to to log off
um but we do have a few for minutes quite a few people have been asking so I'll try and get to many of these as as
we can before um the students have to go um quite a few students have been asking
how long do Calas live yes so in the W koalas can live for
about 10 to 15 years so they're pretty long live probably about about as long
as people's dogs really yeah yeah that's a good comparison let's see there's so many
questions to go through oh a few people are wondering how big the koalas can get
we talked about how there's differences between North and South but I think a few of the students would like to know
just how big they can get yeah so there are differences between north and south
and there one of those is body size um koalas can they can range somewhere
between well it's quite a wide range they can range between four and 15 kilos so some of the big male koalas can get
up to 15 kilos which is it's a pretty heavy koala what's that in dog dog terms that's like a labrador SI size dog
that's about the size of my my toddler and I can tell you when I've got to pick her up off the ground it's pretty heavy
that's about the size of of a three-year-old my
three-year-old all right oh a few people would like to know whether or not koalas can swim they
can so yeah there um a lot of animals can swim that you wouldn't expect and
koala is a one of them so that yeah they can swim when they need to but they
don't like to swim right just looking through some of these
questions oh a few people were wondering we got to listen to the boy koala
singing to the girl what does it sound like if the girl thinks that sounds very
attractive and would like to answer back the girls do call but they don't necessarily sing back to the boys so the
girls also have their own vocalizations and koalas can communicate to each other vocalizing boy calls are really deep
kind of like people boy calls are really deep and then the girls are a much um higher pitched call and a a bit
squeakier yeah it's a pretty high pitched sound isn't it it's a pretty high pitched squeal actually yes I'm
sure if the teachers um did a little uh Googling they could find a video that shows you what that sound looks like it
can be pretty deafening and if you're in the bush and you heard a male or a female koala without knowing what they
are art you'd probably be pretty frightened wouldn't you like they're they're yes they're quite extreme from a
human perspective well I grew up in Canada and the first time I heard uh a possum which
has a very similar kind of growl in a tree I got a little bit scared I didn't know what it was so yeah I think if you
didn't know it was a koala you might you might get a little a little frightened so obviously the kids are
often seeing in the news sometimes that koalas are not well and they see Koalas in videos that that need help some of
them would like to know what what do you do if you see a koala in a tree or maybe on the ground and it doesn't look very
well y so um the first thing to do
yourself I wouldn't approach the koala and I wouldn't try to handle the koala because a sick and injured koala can you
know in tryo it's frightened it's really scared and in you know because it's scared it could try to defend itself and
you might get hurt but what you can do is look up of your local Care organizations so you can call call
places like wies or any other local koala Care Organization and they'll send a carer
out who can come and do an assessment on that koala if it needs to go into care
and be rehabilitated then they'll be the ones who are able to catch it and bring it into care and take care of it before
releasing it again absolutely you need very specialist training to handle animals in
the wild and it really depends on the animal as well the training that you need and um you and I have seen koala
claws up close plenty of times you do not want to mess with a koala those those claws are pretty sharp uh they're
designed for climbing but yeah they're SHP designed for climbing but when
they're scared they'll they'll use them to protect themselves so you have to be careful
absolutely all right oh here's a good one um one one that we've talked about
actually recently you and I what types of predators do koalas have to deal with
ah that is a really good one so there's a couple of different natural predators
that koalas have to deal with and it really again it really depends on where you are in the country and what what
other animals are in the area so dingos dingo are one of those natural predators and they'll either a they'll capture and
Hunt koalas when they're on the ground uh some of the other animals that can get them is you you'd be surprised
particularly some of some of those people down in Southern Australia but further north carpet snakes carpet
snakes can eat quite a large number of koalas up in a tree other things like
large birds of prey can get them as well so wedgetail Eagles are able to get them so it's really those Predators those
large predators that can can handle an animal as big as a koala and that's where their camouflage
is so important because that's they're hiding from when they're up in those trees so sometimes it's tough for us
because we need to go out and spot these koalas and it's like oh I wish these were easier to find but they are trying
to hide from all those predators that might be trying to get them all right here's another one that
that I think is a really important one U do koalas carry viruses yes um all animals carry viruses
actually so just just like people just like any other animals koalas can carry
viruses as well and a range of other diseases so those viruses and diseases
can negatively impact koalas just like they can negatively impact people and
one of the challenges for um koala populations is when they're under a whole bunch of other pressures so
there's things like when they're losing their habitat or maybe animals are getting hit by cars or they don't have
enough leaves to eat those sorts of things then the impact that these viruses and these other and these
diseases can have on koalas and koala populations gets increased and magnified that one of the biggest challenges with
koala health is it's it's the the combined impact of all of these
different things that means you know what might have been just a a cold for a koala before turns that cold into
something that's a lot worse you know and and that really impacts the
koala there's a few questions here about the technology that we use as well
there's a couple questions here about drones so I'm assuming there's a few people out there who who may have drones
themselves or or or get to use them they are they can be a lot of fun um one person was wondering do we have pilots
who who fly them live and manually steer them or do they get pre-programmed and
they just follow a specific route that we set both actually so it it depends on
who's doing the survey so we try to survey use the drones to survey a specific area most of the time flying in
a lawn mower patent so you can pre-program the Drone or you can manually fly it to go up and down and
record the area that you're looking for what we do is we have the pilots then on the ground who are then looking at the
the video feed that's coming from the Drone to identify when they potentially see a koala there's a lot of work going
on in the background at the moment to you know use some of the latest artificial intelligence algorithms to
help us automatically identify koalas from drones but we you know teams are still working on that challenge so at
the moment the best way that people are really using drones is they're manually flying them or they're sort of between
manual and automatic they're letting the Drone fly an automatic path but they're watching it manually to then take
control of the Drone and inspect to see if that what looks like a koala hot blob is actually a koala and even drones
aren't perfect at spotting koalas I think a really good example which was sent to us from one of our collaborator collaborators just yesterday so they've
been out flying drones in North Queensland uh looking for koalas and unfortunately they didn't find anywhere
they were looking but they show me some really really good examples of when some things may look like a koala from a
thermal drone and it's really not one of those ones was a are these um aboral
termite Mounds so you can get termites up in the trees and it's a it's a blob of a nest of termites that are sitting
there and through the thermal drone that looks a lot like a koala like that's the same sort of shape and size sitting in
the same sort of places of the trees so it can be a really tough challenge even when you're using something like a
drone well this is actually um leads us very nicely into another question
someone had which is do you know if syyro uses drones to see other things do we use drones to look at other animals
we use drones for a whole range of different things um so we use drones to
look at the distribution of weeds so both in the environment as well as in our agricultural zones we use drones to
look at the health of crops so we can use them to fly them around and look at the health of crops we've also used them
in some of these more remote places in Northern Australia to look for things like buffal or feral pigs um so there's
a whole wide range of different ways we can use drones and we do use drones to
help help us in our everyday work another really cool example that I think
is um some teams use them to better understand the health of water holes or
bongs up here in Northern Australia so they can map out these bab bongs regularly to better understand the
condition of those and how those bongs are changing through time all right so we're g to have to
wrap up soon so I think it would be good to answer a couple questions about how to use the app because there's there are
a few of those one question I've got two that I think are good one question is what what should we do how do we tell if
there's a joey in the pouch and what do we do how do we Market if we do see a
mother koala with her baby how do we record that in the app so it can be
quite hard to tell if there's a joey in the pouch and we don't expect people to you know give us with certainty that
they've seen seen a joey in the pouch so you've really got to look for that that moving bulge when the Joey is getting
bigger or even making sure that you can see the Joey poking its head out head out of the pouch in the koala spotter
app there's a number of questions you can answer about the koala and one of those is does it have a joey what we
recommend is there's three options there's yes there's no and those are if you're certain I you're certain that
there wasn't a Joey or yes you saw a Joey and you can record it there's also I'm unsure if you're not sure just click
unsure and that's really good information for us we click that button a lot don't we
because sometime it's very hard to tell when they're very high up in the tree it's very hard to tell all right the
last question and again I am so sorry I can see there are tons more I did my best to get through as many as possible
um to all of the teachers if if the students are really Keen please feel free to contact the National qu quala
monitoring program and myself and Andrew or another member of the team we promise we will find those answers for you uh
but the last one I think really good to ask about the app is what does someone do if they're walking around and they're
looking for a coala but they happen to see another rare animal do we want them
to record that as well absolutely so while koala spotter is called koala Spotter and we really want
you to spot koalas we really want you to record whatever other animals you see as well so you can record and well hit a
record and say it's not a koala leave us a note and say that you've seen something else and our teams in the
background will find that and will make sure that it's labeled to something that's not a koala so one thing you can
really be confident in is whenever you're sending information through the while spotter app we've always got teams
that are looking on that data as it's coming through and making sure that we can validate and answer any questions or
concerns that were they raised about that sighting that's right we're very careful
when the data comes in we check it we recheck it we check it a third time to make sure that that uh those sightings
are all right um and we're not mixing up uh different animals that people have recorded for sure all right everybody
again I am so sorry I I'm so happy to see all of these amazing questions on my
screen I'm so glad that everybody was interested and engaged that's wonderful for us we were so happy to talk to you
about this today but sadly we are out of time so we do need to wrap up uh as I
say please submit any questions that we didn't get to we will definitely uh get back to you as soon as we can with our
answers and just a huge thank you to everybody who helped put this together
all of our amazing partners with the program and of course on behalf of Andrew and myself thanks everybody for
coming in thanks all it's been really great talking to you.

[Music plays]

(Dr Andrew Hoskins) The National Koala Monitoring Program

is using the best technology and analytics

to come up with the best estimates we can of koala populations

and distributions right around the country.

Today we're here in the Redlands Coast region,

and we're going to show you some of the many ways that we look for koalas

under the National Koala Monitoring Program.

We can do this using thermal drones,

looking for koalas from above

or looking for koala poos using things like detection dogs.

We also use acoustic recorders which let us hear koalas in the environment,

or we can use our eyes and just walk around looking for them

and counting them ourselves.

We also have citizen science apps that we are able to use

that lets anybody come out,

look for koalas and spot them

and bring that information back into the National Koala Monitoring program.
Detection Dog

(Dr Romane Cristescu) Hi, my name is Dr Romane Cristescu

and this is Summer here,

and we are from Detection Dog for Conservation

at the University of the Sunshine Coast.

So basically what they do is they help us find koala scats

and through their scats we know that koala live in the habitat.

And so we are really detecting and mapping koala habitat.

And then often we also want to know health, koalas' health.

And so for that we deploy what we call our genetic detection dog.

And that dog takes us to the very fresh scat.

We collect the scat and we bring them back to the lab.

Search

[Music plays]

Stay with me.

Stay with me.

[Music plays]

Yes. Good boy.

So, basically, um, we were searching the landscape for koala scats,

and Austin got very excited and suddenly dropped.

And so that's his indication that he's got something.

So what I do then, I ask him to show me

because it's still really hard to find a scats in that,

you know, very complex litter.

And so he's pointed the scats with his nose and here it is.

So with the National Koala Monitoring program,

we've been doing actually a lot of different method testing.

So we're really keen to always know the strengths and limitations

of the different innovation that we do for koala conservation.

So from detection, using dog or acoustic recorder,

to density to health measure.

All the methods have pros and cons and they have strengths and limitations.

And only by knowing that really well,

we'll be able to select the best method

and really get accurate data on koalas.

So we just have one of our koala coming down the tree.
Koala

And we saw him before and there was quite a lot of bird's activity

and we thought potentially he was being harassed by the birds.

And so he's just come down you can see that he's got a collar

and an ear tag.

So the collar is so that we know its location through the landscape,

especially here, there’s a lot of houses, a lot of roads.

We really want to know how we can manage those safely.
AirTag

So those little Bluetooth koala ear tags are really essential link

between citizen scientists and koala conservation.

Basically, thanks to that little tag people can report where koala are

but also who is where.

So linking each individual koala to their home range

and which are the koala in their home range and sharing that life with them.

It's very critical because all that data enables government, for instance,

to make decisions on where to conserve koala habitat.

And it also is a way to train every one of us

to become protector or guardians of our koala

because we can learn how to recognise when a koala is sick

and report it through the app.

And then we can get in touch through the app with local wildlife carer

and those people are amazing citizens

who come rescue koala and bring them to hospital so they can get treated

and released them back into the wild.
Koala Spotter

(Dr Samantha Munroe) The National Koala Monitoring Program

has created an app called Koala Spotter,

which lets people record koala sightings no matter where they are.

So if you're out walking in town or on a bushwalk or at the park

and you spot a koala, you can take a picture,

record your location and send that data to us.

The data you collect using the app

gets sent to our National Koala Sightings database,

and from there we use that information to create maps of where they live,

how many koalas there are and also whether or not they're healthy.

We've deliberately designed this app so that anybody,

no matter their age, can use this and get out there and have some fun.

And believe it or not,

most of the data that we've gotten through this app so far

has come from family and kids who are just out together on an adventure.

(Dr Andrew Hoskins) We're really trying to make sure we can

look at all of the different monitoring approaches and technologies

that are out there for koalas,

and use them in a best practice way

to allow us to, to tell that national story of the koala.
[Music plays]