How many koalas are there, really?

How many koalas are there, really?

A friend recently told me that koala numbers are on the decline.  When the wine and conversation ran out I went home and spent hours on the Internet trying to find out how many koalas there actually are in Australia.

When I want to know how many sheep there are, I just look up the Australia Commodity Statistics.

There were 174.3 million sheep in 1970, 132.7 million sheep in 1980, 118.6 million at the turn of the century (year 2000) and 99.3 million in 2003 -- obviously a species in decline.

But it is never so easy when I want to know how many native animals there are.

The best advice on Koalas seems to be that there are somewhere between 100,000 and one million in Australia.  That's an order of magnitude difference of 1,000 percent and extracted from a published paper in a reputable journal.

So how many koalas are there really in Australia?  If anybody knows, I would really appreciate an email with a link or reference to some hard data.

The research paper on koalas acknowledged the lack of consensus regarding the size and viability of "remaining populations" and "reasons for decline or overabundance".

Koala numbers were apparently increasing to such an extent in Victoria that the state government introduced a hormone contraceptive plan to curb numbers -- but that was a few years ago.

I wonder how many koalas were incinerated in the January, 2003, bushfires?

Are these koala populations now recovering?  A lot more of New South Wales is National Park -- so are koala numbers increasing?

Given we spend so much money on state of the environment-type reports and we are always being told species are on the verge of extinction, I find it increasingly difficult to accept that we don't have better information on numbers and trends in native animal populations.

After all, what is more basic to a conservation program than knowing whether numbers are generally trending up or down?

It was in 1998 that I first became aware of how poor our environmental statistics are.

Cane farmers were being publicly accused of killing dugongs.  Dugongs are large aquatic mammals closely related to elephants that feed on sea-grass.

The allegation was that a dioxin by-product of sugar cane production was killing dugongs.  It was later established that the dioxin is naturally occurring, has nothing what-so-ever to do with sugarcane farming and was not killing dugongs.

I am still unclear whether dugong populations are on the increase or decline, but I do know that there are harvest quotas based on indigenous communities wanting to eat dugongs at special ceremonial occasions such as weddings.

What would others think if people wanted roasted koala served up at their wedding?

I am not only interested in how Koala populations are trending, but also populations of other native animals like quolls, wombats, dugongs, mallee fowls and mahogany gliders.

There is only so much money for saving the environment.

I would like to know that the money that is currently being spent on environmental protection is achieving tangible environmental benefits measured, at least in part, by how our rare and endangered native animals are really faring -- including our koalas.

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