Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A professor has received a $5 million grant, to investigate whether rising CO2 and predicted endless drought will make the Koala’s Eucalyptus leaf diet too toxic for them to eat.
… The koala could soon be even more endangered than at present, if it turns out that climate change alters the nutritional value of the only food it can eat—Eucalypt leaves. Assistant Professor Elizabeth Neilson from the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences from University of Copenhagen has received a $5 million grant from the Villum Young Investigator Program for the search of how the chemical structure of the leaves is disrupted.
“We are going to investigate how two distinct results of climate change, drought and elevated CO2 levels, affect the balance between nutrient and toxicant content of the Eucalypt leaves and how this affects the Koala. Eucalypt leaves are highly toxic and the koala needs to sleep or rest for 20 hours a day to efficiently detoxify the poisonous components and gain sufficient energy from their diet. Therefore, the huge amount of energy spent on detoxification is only just about made up by the nutritional value. Any shift in the eucalypt chemistry caused by climate changes may alter the balance of nutritional value and toxicity, and impact koala survival,” says Assistant Professor Elizabeth Neilson.
She and a group of colleagues founded the idea behind the project back in 2012 and she has been working in the lab and in the field almost ever since. …
Read more: http://phys.org/news/2016-02-climate-koalas-diet-inedible.html
I’ve got to admit, I’d be working in the field as well, if someone gave me a $5 million grant.
But it seems deeply implausible that the Koala will be affected by any climate change we’re likely to cause. Koalas have been around for at least 20 – 30 million years, during which Australia has seen radical changes in climate, swinging from rainforest to desert. The ancestors of Koalas had a much more varied diet, but were forced to specialise when the continent dried out, during the brutal dive into the current Quaternary glaciation.
There are issues which threaten the species, such as the raging Chlamydia epidemic which is threatening to destroy wild populations. I doubt very much that climate is anywhere near as serious an issue, as the threat posed by sexually transmitted disease. A return to a warm, wet climate, as prevailed before our current cold period, would not be a threat to a species which has endured far worse.
The main animals endangered by liberal stupidity is Humans !!
Poor poor koalas!
Every time the eco-looney go to ‘save’ some CO2 endangered animal, they get very upset when they discover the animal is not endangered by CO2. Instead the animals start catching illnesses the lunatics bring with them. Not to forget the dire circumstances koala relationship encounter as they attempt to seek mates with huge contrivances wrapped on their necks.
The researchers should first practice by studying other researchers; food, sex, relationships, lack of intelligence, inability to accept reality.
I live in koala habitat. DOGS kill the koalas. I’ve had to watch as my local forests have been cleared of koalas by domestic DOGS gone wild. Koalas handle drought by moving to where the tallowoods etc get more moisture. This concentration of population may make them easier picking for DOGS. But koalas survived the drought of 1902 (our driest known year for the continent and for my region) and the high heat + drought of 1915 in such numbers that 2 million could be slaughtered in a year during the 1920s for export pelts. Koalas survive searing drought, our hopelessly mismanaged fire policies and mass culls. They don’t survive DOGS.
Sadly, the people who have all sorts of beliefs about “threats” to wildlife also don’t like guns and are squeamish about baiting.
It the DOGS, Dane.
Here in the gun infested part of the US where I live, unleashed dogs with no visible collar can be assumed to be feral and treated like coyotes, which have returned with a vengeance. When dogs become a pack very little is safe.
Farmers in Australia regularly shoot feral dogs, but vast areas of Australia are very sparsely inhabited, and guns in Australia are not as readily available as the USA, so private control of feral dogs is probably nowhere near as rigorous.
If you really want to appreciate what a total menace coyotes are, you should go to some place that has NO PREDATORS at all. (cept HSS)
NZ has no mammals hence no predators. Delightful place with ground dwelling birds all over the place.
Heck why fly when there is nothing to eat you on the ground.
I say get rid of those coyotes; that would be good for the pikas, and gophers, and prairie dogs. All manner of wonderful creatures would be able to live here without those coyotes.
California used to pay more money to professional varmint hunters to kill coyotes, than it would take to pay herd farmers, to replace all of the range herd animals they CLAIM to have lost to predatory coyotes. Not the animals the coyotes might kill, but also the ones the coyotes just found the carcass of.
Studies have shown that feral dog packs, including the local family dog get togethers kill more sheep than proven coyote kills.
Mess not with that you do not understand !
G
Isn’t a bat a mammal? NZ has bats, two species if I recall.
Then I guess they will have to shift the conclusion of their study to CO2 promoting the increase in dog numbers (somehow – I’m sure they’ll manage it)
bounty on a fox is $10 a proof skinstrip
bounty on a roaming loose dog is?
$50
so some poor mutt dumped and starving is worth more than a bloody fox that kills as many native critters if not more?
let alone the lambs taken nightly
yeah a hungry dog will take a sheep or sickly calf too..but not nightly like foxes
ah yes but a dog is easier to shoot than a fox.
and I would say more -by a huge number -of Koalas get themselves wiped out on the roads especially in the adelaide hills and other areas, than by dogs.
Here it’s dogs. Small or medium dogs forming active packs. Fast killers (I’ve seen one small ginger pack leader kill a wallaby in a second.) Also cats, dingoes and foxes. Some chlamydia in our populations, too.
Different stories elsewhere, but here it’s dogs in loud, active packs, not the giants you hear about in National Parks adjacent to sheep country, but fast and working together.
ozspeaksup
The dogs kill for fun. Can kill 20 sheep and don’t eat them. That’s the problem. The foxes kill for food.
To back up what Mosomoso and Alex have said, it is well-fed family pooches, not “some poor mutt dumped and starving”, that do most of the killing. We used to run sheep about half a mile out of a small town and it was nothing to come out in the morning to find 10 sheep in various stages of disembowelment, either dead or trailing their guts behind them around the paddock. Foxes will attack a new-born lamb or a ewe on the ground giving birth, but there is no fox alive that can take down a healthy adult sheep and rip its throat out. That’s not fox damage, it’s dog damage. Whilst we had a few dingo crosses in the hills around us, the dingos stayed in the hills and confined their hunting to roos and the occasional calf. They were solitary hunters.
What we found was that the local family pets from town were forming a pack of about 14 dogs at night and going on a killing spree around the district just for fun. They were tail-waggers by day and killers by night. Householders were warned and warned to restrain their pooches – or else. They didn’t, so out came the rifles. Some of the dogs we had to shoot as they were in the act of killing our sheep were so tame that they would come closer to a whistle. After half a dozen were shot, the message got through to the townsfolk and dogs were kept at home of a night, The foxes and dingos were still out there, but we had no more mauled sheep.
What dogs will do to sheep they will easily do to koalas in bushland suburbs, particularly if there are no sheep about to satisfy their blood lust. I might add that we lived in a koala area. You could often see their claw marks on the smooth-barked gums.
And if you’re appalled that we shot family pets, tell it to their irresponsible owners and to our disemboweled sheep.
Here in Aus, bats you see hanging from the trees in the cities and flying at night carry a virus similar to rabies. Steer well clear of a bunch of them hanging in a tree above you.
and I really don’t know why nobody responds to
bloodlands: Europa zwischen
Hitler und Stalin (Gebundene
Ausgabe)
Timothy Snyder, Martin Richter
is it just ‘Feigheit vor dem Feind’.
OR plain ‘I don’t care. Meet me shopping.’
Just asking. Hans
It’s too bad that increased CO2 levels have increased forest growth by about 25% over the past 200 years, which has been a huge boon to all life on earth…
Even IPCC’s 2013 AR5 report admits there has been NO increasing trends in drought frequency nor severity over the past 50 years…
If anything, precipitation has increased slightly from increased ocean evaporation in response to the tiny 0.85C of warming recovery enjoyed since the end of the LITTLE ICE AGE in 1850…
I’m sure that with this $5 million grant, the grant hounds will be able to contrive a computer model showing CO2 will eventually cause the cute little Koala bears to explode from spontaneous combustion 5 years after the “researchers” retire with full pensions intact…
What are the odds against Assistant Professor Neilson finding that Climate Change™ has no effect, or could even be beneficial?
“What are the odds against Assistant Professor Neilson finding that Climate Change™ has no effect, or could even be beneficial?”
To ask the question is to answer it, as they say in France.
Governments are not in the habit of doling out money to otherwise unemployable
” scientists “, to do research to show that nothing untoward is happening, and everything is AOK.
G
Let them eat cake!
Only just past living memory, the Federation Drought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_Drought April 1902 was the driest month in the 20th century.
“Climatologists today frequently view the Federation Drought as a major climate shift across eastern Australia from the wet period of the nineteenth century to a dry spell lasting until the mid-1940s.” If the koalas survived that, I don’t think climate will be their biggest problem in my lifetime. I actually think it’s appalling that $5 million dollars is being spent on this rather than the known immediate problems koalas have. It’s like going on a Mediterranean cruise when your roof’s leaking.
Here’s another one that’s rather older. http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8065&context=scipapers From the abstract, “we show that a mid-Holocene ENSO forced collapse of the Australia summer monsoon and ensuing mega-drought spanning approximately 1500 yrs (sic.) [caused a collapse of Aboriginal society]”. A mega-drought lasting 1500 years? Are we to assume that the koalas went extinct then and have re-evolved in the last few thousand years, or what?
Great big droughts are bad news.
Apparently eucalypts grow better with more CO2, especially the leaves, so I think we can expect CO2 as such to *help* koalas.
Koalas in Australia are spread down the eastern coast from the tropical North to the much cooler temperate South. A large ambient temperature differential. A few degrees of temp difference is not going to be of a concern.
Koalas are very fussy eaters and of the many many species of Eucalyptus trees in Australia they only eat the leaves of very few – maybe less than ten.
The real issue with the Koalas long term is loss of habitat. – Caused by clearing and bush fires.
A certain amount of forest can only support a fixed amount of Koalas.
In case you didn’t know…. Koalas make are not mute… they have a low curious grunting sound. Very disconcerting if you are in the bush at night under a tree with a big male in it
Particularly if it’s horny
I definitely wouldn´t call it a “low grunting” sound. It’s more like a roar, sort of halfway between a braying donkey and a roaring lion and quite loud for such a small animal. And, yes, I have camped in the bush with a male nearby.
Aren’t there koala control programmes in certain areas where the koala population has grown to be too great? I heard an interview with a wildlife scientist who said the kills are absolutely necessary (to prevent starvation and disease) and that neighbouring koalas didn’t care a stuff when their neighbours were killed – just meant more bush tucker for the survivors!
I believe the authorities try to keep these necessary programme quiet so the greenies don’t get upset.
A picture that seems to fit this quite well: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qeAJ8WIzA-E/VlT5xsNC89I/AAAAAAAAE9c/ul494qpjwuI/s1600/Tom_Turk_and_Daffy_1944_16_dunce.jpg
Mmmmmm…….Koala burgers !!
Sorry Marcus
Tastes like lamb smothered in liniment
You must soak in a liberal amount of cola first. Of course then you end up with Coca Koala.
don’t know if reducing emissions would help the poor koala bear
here is a piece on the spuriousness of correlations between cumulative values
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2725743
Koalas survived the last ice-age when climate in Australia was much drier than now. However the isolated population in West Australia did die out, probably because too little forest remained during the glacial maximum. Experimentsl reintroduction in WA (Yanchep) has worked well enough, so current conditions are apparently suitable.
So since they started in 2012, they’ve spent 3 years in the lab and field and concluded that local drought and local CO2 levels could affect local plant life. And that any change to the Eucalypt plant might affect the Koalas.
I wonder how many millions it took to reach those earth-shattering conclusions?
I guess my skepticism has taken a turn for the worse! Having studied how these scientists work over the past dozen years or more, I am certain if we could get their emails they would say something like:
-“The polar bear is not longer a credible or fashionable poster creature – the bu99ers are getting fat and even sunning themselves on the beaches of Churchill Manitoba on Hudson’s Bay where the Arctic ice disappears for half a year at a time”
-Hey, how ’bout the koala bear? I saw them on a post card and they are cute?
-Nah, they like it hot anyway and so do the trees they feed on
-Wait a minute, maybe the eucalyptus chemistry changes with heat. This could be a way to speculate on the only thing koala’s eat becoming toxic!”
– Nah, I even saw a video of one of the little stinkers eating a fkin apple!
– Yeah? How many people do you think saw such a video. Pack your boots and bikini we’re goin’ downunder!
– Maybe we could write the paper before we go so we can stay a bit longer.”
Reducing CO2 could actually make it 0.01 degree hotter.
It’s as simple as this to PROVE that the radiative forcing greenhouse conjecture is wrong, so you need to consider the alternative paradigm I have developed from correct physics …
The Trenberth, IPCC and NASA energy budget diagrams very clearly imply that back radiation (324W/m^2) can be added to solar radiation (168W/m^2) and then, after deducting non-radiative losses (102W/m^2) the net total of 390W/m^2 supposedly explains the mean surface temperature of 288K using Stefan Bolzmann calculations, which anyone can do if they Google “Stefan Boltzmann calculator” and select the one at tutorvista.com. In fact, because the solar flux is variable, a mean of 390W/m^2 would not produce a mean temperature much above freezing point.
Now, if you use the assumption that back radiation can be included to determine the mean, then you must apply this concept for every point on the globe. There are, however, places receiving not the mean solar radiation of 168W/m^2 but over 800W/m^2 of solar radiation. This is because the solar constant is actually about 1366W/m^2 and, without clouds on a clear day, less than 40% is absorbed or reflected, thus leaving at least 819W/m^2 in tropical regions where the Sun passes directly overhead at about noon. So, instead of the 24-hour global mean of 168W/m^2 we have an extra 651W/m^2 to add to that 390W/m^2 which is the net mean. But the Stefan Boltzmann calculations for what is now 390+651 = 1041W/m^2 is 368.1K which is about 95°C.
Hence there is something very seriously wrong with the radiative forcing greenhouse conjecture, and that is because radiation reaching the surfaces of planets like Earth and Venus is not the primary determinant of the surface temperature. A totally different paradigm explains reality and the required thermal energy is supplied by non-radiative processes as is explained on my website and in my linked papers, video and book.
In Australia one isn’t allowed to pick up a log in a forest, but then a wildfire sweeps through burning everything, including the koalas. Ironic times.
Forget Koala bears.
Our puppies are sad, and we need to spend billions on globalclimatewarmingchange to cheer them up.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/global-warming-could-be-causing-dogs-to-become-depressed-say-pet-behaviourists-a6854006.html