Remarkably little is known about the love
life of koalas. Are they fussy about who they mate with, or is it simply a case
of a male being in the right place at the right time?…. and by ‘right time’ I
mean when the female is receptive. This breeding season we are hoping to find the
answer. We are deploying proximity collars fitted with GPS loggers to every
koala we can find in a woodland patch. These collars record the time and
duration of interactions between collared koalas. So far, we have 19 koalas collared
but still have another 17 collars to deploy.
The study is the basis of an honours
project by Deakin student ‘Darcy’. Darcy has already done an amazing job of
preparing the collars, and has proven to be a capable koala catcher and
handler. He will now have the task of tracking and observing these koalas, mapping
resources throughout the site, and in January retrieving the collars for data
download and interpretation.
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| Darcy bonding with the joey of one of his study animals |
