MISSION TO BUILD A SUPER KOALA
Inside the fight for the future of an Australian icon
It’s a peach of a day at Cleland Wildlife Park, a conservation reserve on the lip of Mount Lofty Summit, about half an hour’s drive from Adelaide’s CBD. The temperature sits in the mid-20s. The sky is cloudless. Apollo sits quietly on a branch in the park’s koala enclosure, his eyes struggling to stay open as he basks in the beaming sun. It’s hard not to be taken by these creatures. The dessert spoon noses. The fluffy, moonshaped ears. The dismissive grumpiness whenever you try to engage.
And while Apollo is clearly oblivious to the fact as he drifts off to sleep, he could play a key role in saving the future of his species.
The science behind it is as complicated as it comes, but the story itself is relatively simple. Koalas are in trouble. Deep, deep trouble. Across the east coast they’re dying at alarming rates thanks to a combination of land clearing, climate change and diseases such as chlamydia and retrovirus.
The crisis reached a crescendo on the eastern seaboard in February when they were declared an endangered species in Queensland, NSW and the ACT, making international headlines.
In South Australia, the healthiest population was decimated by the 2020-21 Kangaroo Island bushfires and those remaining are largely inbred and susceptible to disease.
“We’re actually talking about the future of a species here,” says Professor Chris Daniels, a well-known scientist and conservationist.
“We are asking how we can save the species, not here, not in Bundaberg, or wherever, but the species. Full stop. It’s as serious as that.”
Now Daniels and a world-renowned team of scientists, researchers, conservationists and koala lovers, backed largely by a collection of philanthropists and under the banner of the Koala Life foundation, have embarked on an ambitious plan to do just that.
It’s not without problems or sceptics, but the desire and determination is strong. And confidence is high.
The whole program kicked off when 28 healthy koalas were taken from Kangaroo Island in the wake of the fires and housed at Cleland. They became known as “The Golden Children”.
Then four sub-adult male koalas – disease free as chlamydia and retrovirus are largely sexually transmitted – were rushed across the Sa-victorian border from the Strzelecki Ranges in December last year to breed at Cleland. Enter “The Strzelecki Boys”.
The general idea is that if you put “The Golden Children” and “The Strzelecki Boys” together, you create a new disease-free koala at Cleland, which at this point has the only disease-free colony in Australia. The breed would be the first of its kind anywhere in the world.
Let’s call it a Super Koala.
“I like the ring of that,” Daniels says, smiling.
THE COLLECTION MISSION
It wasn’t quite a stealth raid in the vein of Zero Dark Thirty, but it was a complex mission, with a high potential for failure, which required cool heads, military precision and meticulous planning.
Once all the boxes were ticked, an expert crew of 30 from the Department for Environment and Water, Hickman Victoria Plantations and Koala Life, complete with portable laboratory, drones and thermal imaging equipment, converged on Churchill, Victoria, in mid-december last year.
Drones combed the tree lines of the Strzelecki Ranges in the early hours of the morning in search of koalas.
Thermal imaging located them. GPS marked the trees. Then the climbers arrived after sun-up.
Resembling human spiders, with elaborate leg spikes and ropes, they ascended the slender gum trees, sometimes as high as 20m, to find the marsupials. Once found, the drones were sent up, again, this time to determine the sex. The mission worked.
Across three full days, drones found 73 koalas. Just seven were brought to ground, all safely. Four young, healthy males were suitable and rushed to Mount Gambier, to avoid any border closures. At the Mt Gambier checkpoint, the koalas were placed in the care of Koala Life vet teams and taken to Adelaide Zoo and Cleland to begin nine weeks of adjustment. With one small hitch.
To help them adapt to their new surroundings, they were given aptly named “poo smoothies”.
“One of the big problems with translocating koalas is that bacteria in the gut is very, very selective for the plants that they were eating at the site,” Daniels says.
“So if you’re transporting them to SA, you can’t transport leaves across the border, so you have to collect the poos of koalas here that are eating the gum that will be fed to new arrivals.
“You take the poo out, you grind it up, into the slushie. Enjoy.”
The Strzelecki Boys had arrived.
WE ARE ASKING HOW WE CAN SAVE THE SPECIES, NOT HERE, NOT IN BUNDABERG … THE SPECIES. FULL STOP. IT’S AS SERIOUS AS THAT
SURVIVAL SCIENCE
Daniels is passionate when discussing the future of the marsupial and even more animated when waxing lyrical about “survival science”.
“Survival science is more than just habitat conservation,” he says. “Really since Teddy Roosevelt, we practised the concept of going back to the start, we practise conservation science by protecting habitat.
“You know Kakadu, a Great Barrier Reef, you find it, you keep it, put a fence around it.
“It does a great job and is still the mainstay of how we preserve species and ecosystems. “But it’s not enough.”
Species and ecosystems are still declining quickly, caused by a variety of factors, not the
least of which is climate change, he says.
So you need a variety of approaches to combat it, targeting both species and ecosystems and using a variety of tools – everything from pest and weed control, to revegetation, to citizen science.
That’s a dumbed-down version but, in a nutshell, all mixed together, this becomes survival science. Koalas are a prime example of the need for a broader approach, Daniels says, with much of the funding directed towards new habitats and tree planting.
“But it’s actually more complicated than that,” he says. “They also have high levels of disease, particularly in Queensland and NSW.”
So Koala Life chose another route, which led them to the The Golden Children – a playful reference to the 1986 Eddie Murphy comedy The Golden Child – and The Strzelecki Boys.
Koala Life director Dr Chris West – a vet, former zoological director at the Zoological Society of London, and former chief executive of Zoos South Australia and Edinburgh Zoo – says the program is also significant because it is aiming to, for once, get ahead of the curve.
“So the really good thing about this is we’re far enough ahead of it, but we can see where it’s heading. So that we can put things in place and put in an insurance breeding program,” he says, before adding simply: “Survival science is the future of conservation.”
FIGHT OVER SCIENCE … AND DOLLARS
The fight for koalas is a competitive space. There’s the battle for money. For big names. For attention. Then throw a fair dose of interstate rivalry into the mix.
Daniels says the only way to win over the sceptics to what some have labelled an “audacious” approach, is to simply prove it works.
“For us it’s about proof of concept, because it’s still science, which means there’s still a lot about it we think will work, but we still need to prove it,” he says.
Daniels says there is general support in Victoria for the work but a lack of cut-through in other states, that are understandably focused on other means, such as habitat restoration.
“They also look down on SA koalas as inbred,” he says, shrugging his shoulders.
There are some outspoken critics to Koala Life’s approach. Specialist koala ecologist Steve Phillips recently told the ABC there were too many unknowns with its program.
“We … know that the recruitment of genes into koala populations is through the females rather than males, so using males in this program means there’s a high probability the project will fail,” he said.
So what is the science behind the project? And will it actually work?
Professor Corey Bradshaw, from Flinders University, a world-renowned expert on genetic modelling, has just embarked on a four-year, $750,000 project funded by the Australian Research Council to try to answer at least some of these questions.
He agrees it is complicated, and there are many unknowns, but he is confident.
“There are other examples around the planet but it’s kind of wing it and see,” he says.
The potential pay-off, however, is enormous. If successful it would be “sold to the top scientists in the world (as a) model for genetic rescue across marsupials”.
And, obviously, have an immediate impact on the crisis facing Australia’s koalas.
“They’re crashing on the east coast, mainly from deforestation,” he says.
“So this is also potentially an insurance population for the entire country.”
Daniels says if this occurs “it won’t matter what state came up with it”.
WE CAN … PUT IN AN INSURANCE BREEDING PROGRAM. SURVIVAL SCIENCE
IS THE FUTURE OF CONSERVATION
WHAT’S NEXT?
The hope is that, within five years, there will be 50 to 60 offspring who can then be relocated around SA, then Victoria, then the rest of the country. To reach this goal, more females will be included in the program, before the breeding program starts in earnest in NovemberDecember.
Daniels will only look about five years ahead but says the program could realistically extend for decades.
“Obviously Cleland is the only place in the world where this is happening for koalas,” he says, almost as an afterthought.