A habitually tired koala yawns during one of its few wakeful hours
Australia’s cuddliest creature – deceptively quirky, lethargic, and affected by chlamydia – is a strange creature by even Australia’s wonky standards!
While visiting the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary, Australia’s oldest and largest koala sanctuary with over 130 koalas according to the park’s entry sign, I took over 80 pictures of sleeping koala bears. I did not realize the overload of sleeping koala pictures I had, likely due to the excitement the cuddly marsupial stirs in even the most solemn of visitors.
These four images are just the tip of the iceberg of the multitude of sleeping koala pictures eating up space on my memory card. If anyone ever needs sleeping koala pictures, I have one from seemingly every angle. All of these pictures made me want to look into some of the strange facts I had heard about koala sleep habits, which led me down a deeper rabbit hole of how peculiar the species actually is.
First, let’s focus on the koala’s infamous (some may say desirable) sleeping habits. According to the World Wildlife Fund (“WWF”), koalas sleep to up to 18 hours a day, as in 75 percent of the day. Every day. While they are awake, it’s not like they’re setting the world ablaze with frenzied activity as they try to salvage 25 percent of the day. They are most likely lumbering around a branch or slowly, methodically chewing eucalyptus leaves with a blank expression, from what I gathered from the “non-sleeping” koalas at Lone Pine. When they are not asleep, they seemingly exist in a hazy fog with a deep desire to chow down on eucalyptus.
Before I get into the role eucalyptus plays in the koalas languid existence, I want to quickly mention the impressiveness of the koalas ability to sleep anywhere. At Lone Pine, koalas were squashed between each other, hugging branches, and sometimes just slouched over, catching some Z’s in the middle of a branch. The devotion to the act was truly spectacular. The reason why koalas are able to sleep just about anywhere on a eucalyptus tree is because they have extra cartilage at the end of their spine that gives them a padded backside, perfect for their tree-potato lifestyle.
So why do koalas sleep up to 18 hours a day? This is because their only source of food, eucalyptus leaves, is a very poor source of nourishment. Not only is it poisonous to most animals, it has such a low nutrient content that koalas need to sleep so much to conserve the energy that it takes to digest this poor excuse for food. The reason why koalas can stomach eucalyptus, to the detriment of an active lifestyle, is because they have a special digestive organ, called a caecum, that removes the toxins from the leaves.
A koala gobbles up a eucalyptus leaf, an arduous process that takes minutes
Not only do koalas enjoy a seemingly lousy food source, but they are very picky eaters. There are 700 species of eucalyptus out there. Koalas can only be bothered to eat less than 50 of these species. It is also not like a koala will willingly eat just any leaf off one of these species of eucalyptus. They often prefer the leaves at the top of the tree because they contain more liquid and slightly more nutrients than the other, nutrient-deficient eucalyptus leaves.
A few other interesting factoids about Australia’s most endearing marsupial are, for one, that they ARE marsupials and not bears. This means that they share similar traits with some of Australia’s other famed marsupials, like the wombat and kangaroo. They have a pouch where joeys (baby koalas) develop for six months after they are prematurely born, which is the case in most marsupials. After the joey emerges from the pouch, it catches a ride on its mother’s back for the next six months. Something that surprised me about koalas when I first got close to one is that they have huge claws, more like the talons of a bird of prey to be accurate. These help them hang onto tree branches. Koalas also get their name from the Aboriginal word for ‘no drink’ according to WWF, because early Australians believed that koalas did not drink because they received all their required moisture from eucalyptus leaves. That is not true as they sometimes wake up in order to find water, especially during heatwaves.
Unfortunately koala numbers are in decline. In the wild, they are affected by chlamydia due to stressful situations. To be clear this is a different strain of chlamydia that affects humans, but it can cause blindness and reproductive tract infections in koalas according to the WWF. In addition to that, tree-clearing is causing massive habitat loss for koalas, especially in New South Wales (“NSW”). According to the WWF, tree clearing has tripled in NSW over the course of the last two years, badly fracturing prime koala habitat. The loss of the trees leads to koalas having to search for food on the ground, a dangerous scenario for the slow animals due to traffic, dog attacks, and chlamydia-inducing stressful situations. According to WWF, in NSW, a quarter of the koala population has been lost in the last twenty years.
But places like Lone Pine are helping by offering koalas a safe environment to live in, along with all-you-can-eat eucalyptus leaves. The sanctuary is worth a trip not only for the koalas (they have 130 of them!), but also because they house practically every other popular Australian animal one can think of, from Tasmanian devils to the platypus. They also have a large outdoor clearing where people can pet kangaroos and emus roam free. Just make sure to watch where you step, as I found out the hard way due to a large pile of kangaroo droppings.
Lone Pine is, of course, most famous for its koalas and the main attraction is being able to hold a koala. I waited for almost an hour to get to hold one and it was well worth the wait. Koalas are deceptively light once they anchor their velociraptor claws into you and incredibly adorable when they look up at you with their blank expression before mentally checking out. Something I found funny about the whole experience was how the zookeepers working with the koalas had to keep switching out the koalas and kept on uttering the phrase “It’s up to the koalas” whenever they had to warn a hopeful koala-holder of the possibility of not becoming a koala-holder. It seemed funny that an animal that sleeps for three-fourths of a day could get so overworked after being held by a couple visitors. But now I know that koalas, like most animals, are very receptive to stress. Once they did their task, they were sent back to their trees to quickly drift away into the sleepy realm and dream about whatever koalas dream about.
Me with the first koala I’ve ever met. Hopefully It will not be the last koala encounter on my trip!