Name: Are Australian koalas going extinct? We asked an ecologist.
Uploaded: 2020-01-15T06:04:40.000Z
Duration: 4 min 5 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

You know when people think about climate change a wildlife, they probably think about polar bears and maybe the Great Barrier Reef.

"As many as 3 percent of the country's New South Wales region may have been killed as fires continue to ravage and destroy their habitat."

The reality is that these flies are not normal.

So I know that there's there's been you know loss of human life definitely loss of property here but what impact has this fire had, this fire season had, on wildlife in Australia?

Well over 1 billion animals are thought to have died or will soon die in the weeks, the months ahead, because of the current fires.

And we've never had a toll like that on our wildlife but it seems that every few days, the statistics get worse.

I don't know where it will end by the end of this fire season.

Are there specific species that are particularly being hard hit by this?

Many many animals cannot flee these big fires.

Either they can't fly, they can't move quickly, they can't burrow — they burn to death.

Particularly because Australia has bulldozed half of our forests, it's hard for wildlife to flee somewhere else and that's why you find a lot of animals — including koalas — are wandering into people's backyards into the streets looking for some habitat to survive in.

When they panic, they climb up a tree. That works when the fires low down.

But it's almost a death sentence when the fire consumes its crown fire, the canopy fire.

People have talked about flames up to 200 feet in the air.  That's 70 meters.

I mean that is — our trees generally don't grow that big.

So any wildlife, birds, or lizards that go to the top of the trees to escape a normal fire, they're sitting ducks really.

So I've seen a lot of particularly hard to watch videos of koalas, you know, basically charred from the fire.

What's the status of the koala now, and what's gonna happen to them?

Our estimation is that koala numbers over the last 230 years have fallen by about 95%, and these fires will be inching that up towards ninety eight ninety nine percent over time.

It's important to remember that this bushfire and the climate crisis — it has come after a couple hundred years of decimating koalas and their habitat.

So for 100 years, koalas were shot for their pelts and there's records of 8 million koala pelts being sold in the United States, the UK, and I think Europe up until the 1930s, when there was a moratorium put on shooting koalas.

The term "functionally extinct" has been thrown around in the media during these fires in reference to the koalas.

What does "functionally extinct" mean, and is that true?

The term "functional extinction" is used for animals where there are only tens or hundreds not even thousands of animals left.

So rhinos, or animals where there's ten or twenty left.

In eastern Australia koalas are listed as a threatened species but at the lowest level they're called vulnerable.

We think they're now eligible to be uplisted to being an endangered species.

There are solutions to these problems, koalas and polar bears don't need to go extinct.

And the term "functional extinction" doesn't help that.

For people like me at home like watching this heart-wrenching footage, is there anything we can do to help the situation?

I think the first thing people can do around the world is to read up about what's happening in Australia, because if it's happening in our country.

If it's not already happening in your country, it will be in the future, of some type, as the climate gets worse and worse.

We need to convince people who don't care about nature or the climate — particularly decision makers, governments, presidents, prime ministers — you have a role in helping keep these species alive.