All animals → Koala

Koala

Phascolarctos cinereus · easy

Koalas eat eucalyptus, which is a strange decision. The leaves are fibrous, low in nutrition, and loaded with compounds toxic to most animals. A koala manages it with an exceptionally long caecum full of bacteria that ferment the material and break down the toxins, and with a liver adapted to process what gets through. The diet still leaves so little surplus energy that koalas sleep for the better part of the day.

Joeys are not born able to digest it. Before weaning, a young koala eats pap — a soft substance produced by its mother that inoculates its gut with the microbes it will need. Without it the leaves would be indigestible.

Koalas have fingerprints so similar to human ones that they have reportedly confused forensic examiners. They also have a descended larynx that lets males produce a bellow far deeper than their size suggests.

They live in eucalypt forest and woodland along eastern and southeastern Australia. The population is under compounding pressure: habitat clearing, vehicle strikes, dog attacks, a widespread and often fatal chlamydia infection, and increasingly severe bushfire seasons that kill animals directly and remove the specific tree species they depend on.

Where it lives

Worml lists the koala as native to Australia. Its habitat is eucalypt woodland and open forest.

Ranges here are reduced to whole countries for playability and exclude introduced populations — see about the data for what that simplification leaves out.

In the game

Koala is rated easy. To solve the round you need to name the single country it lives in. How scoring works →

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