Baby Koala!
Yay!
A few fun facts:
– Baby Koalas are known as ‘Joeys’. Scientists often refer to them using terms like ‘juveniles’, ‘pouch young’ and ‘back young’.
– Younger breeding females usually give birth to one Joey each year, depending on a range of factors. However, not all females in a wild population will breed each year. Some, especially older females, will produce offspring only every two or three years.–
– When the Joey is born, it’s only about 2 centimetres long, is blind and furless and its ears are not yet developed. On its amazing journey to the pouch, it relies on its well-developed senses of smell and touch, its strong forelimbs and claws, and an inborn sense of direction. Once in the pouch, it attaches itself to one of the two teats which swells in its mouth, preventing it from being dislodged from its source of food.
– The Joey stays in its mother’s pouch for about 6 or 7 months, drinking only milk. Before it can tolerate gumleaves, which are toxic for most mammals, the joey must feed on a substance called ‘pap’ which is a specialised form of the mother’s droppings that is soft and runny. This allows the mother to pass on to the joey special micro-organisms from her intestine which are necessary for it to be able to digest the gumleaves. It feeds on this for a period of up to a few weeks, just prior to it coming out of the pouch at about 6 or 7 months of age.
– After venturing out of the pouch, the Joey rides on its mother’s abdomen or back, although it continues to return to her pouch for milk until it is too big to fit inside. The joey leaves its mother’s home range between 1 and 3 years old, depending on when the mother has her next joey. You can adopt your own Joey here!
– Koalas are mostly nocturnal. Nocturnal animals are awake at night and asleep during the day. Koalas, however, sleep for part of the night and also sometimes move about in the daytime. They often sleep for up to 18-20 hours each day.
– An adult koala eats about 1/2 – 1 kilogram of leaves each night.
– There is a myth that Koalas sleep a lot because they ‘get drunk’ on gumleaves. Fortunately, this is not correct! Most of their time is spent sleeping because it requires a lot of energy to digest their toxic, fibrous, low-nutrition diet and sleeping is the best way to conserve energy
– Each Koala’s ‘home’ is made up of several trees called HOME TREES. They visit these same trees regularly. The area covered by these trees is called the Koala’s HOME RANGE. Each Koala has its own home range, which overlaps those of other Koalas. Unless breeding, they don’t normally visit another Koalas home trees. The size of each home range depends upon a range of factors including the quality of the habitat and the sex, age and social position in the population of the Koala.