Australia gears up for the great koala count, using drones, droppings and dogs
13 Dec, 2020 07:55 PM
5 minutes to read
By: Yan Zhuang
One would think that koalas are easy to find and count. They re large. They re fluffy. They re mostly immobile since they tend to sleep for about 20 hours a day.
Not so. It s the fact that they don t move much that makes them hard to spot, said Desley Whisson, a wildlife ecologist at Deakin University in Victoria.
This makes the Australian government s effort to count the population of the native marsupials and record where they live all the more daunting. In November, the government announced that it would commit 2 million Australian dollars to fund an audit of the species and would use new methods to do so.