Zoo InternQuest is a seven-week career exploration program for San Diego County high school juniors and seniors. Students have the unique opportunity to meet professionals working for the San Diego Zoo, Safari Park, and Institute for Conservation Research, learn about their jobs, and then blog about their experience online. Follow their adventures here on the Zoo’s website!
This week, we met with Jennifer Tobey, a Researcher at the Institute for Conservation Research. Ms. Tobey researches koala behavior at the San Diego Zoo as well as around the world, and gave us some insight into their unique qualities and conservation status.
Starting off with some general information, koalas, unlike the popular perception, are not bears at all. Rather, koalas are marsupials, meaning that females carry their young in a pouch after giving birth to a baby koala, called a “joey”. Koalas are native to eastern Australia, where they feed and live on the wide variety of eucalyptus trees that grow in the area.
Working at the Zoo, Ms. Tobey spends much of her time studying the mating behaviors of koalas. From her presentation, we learned that koalas like to mate in the springtime, since it is an ideal time to give birth as the year proceeds into summertime, given the weather and available resources. When it is time for a koala to mate, male koalas have a gland located on their chest from which they release a strongly scented chemical into the air. This scent is meant to mark their territory. Male koalas also let off a low, croak-like sound which, combined with their scent, makes it easier for female koalas to find them on their search for a mate.
Koala pregnancy only lasts a mere 35 days, after which a mother gives birth to a joey, which Ms. Tobey describes as being the size of a jelly bean. At this time, the newborn joey makes its way into its mother’s pouch, where it receives the nutrients necessary to grow and develop into a young koala. A joey stays in its mother’s pouch for about six months, at which point the joey has grown too large to stay just in the pouch. When the new mating season comes around and the mother gives birth to a new joey, it is time for the grown joey to become independent of its mother, beginning a new stage in the circle of life.
Like many other species, koalas are territorial creatures, each claiming their own eucalyptus tree. For a koala, a eucalyptus tree is their sole means for food, water, and shelter, which is why they are primarily arboreal. However, in the early 1900s, this fact made it easy for poachers to hunt koalas in areas such as the Blue Mountains of Australia. Due to excessive hunting, the koala population plummeted and they are still considered a vulnerable species today.
This is where people like Ms. Tobey and other researchers and scientists at the Institute for Conservation Research step in. For the past years, Ms. Tobey and a team of koala conservationists have been working both in Australia and at the San Diego Zoo to study koalas, in order to better learn how to protect and conserve the species. One interesting discovery they have recently made is that though koalas may look different in various regions of Australia, they are all the same species, which have only changed a few physical features to better suit the environment.
Overall, koalas have been making a comeback as their population is growing, even in the Blue Mountains where they were originally hunted to near extinction. From this we can learn to respect nature, lest we lose one of the most beloved animals on the planet.
Evelyn, Species Spotlight
Week Three, Winter Session 2019
