Huh.

Koalas ‘Functionally Extinct’ After Australia Bushfires Destroy 80% Of Their Habitat

Functional extinction is when a population becomes so limited that they no longer play a significant role in their ecosystem and the population becomes no longer viable. While some individuals could produce, the limited number of koalas makes the long-term viability of the species unlikely and highly susceptible to disease.

Ruh-roh.

Australian critters always seemed to me like they were living on borrowed time. The critters from “The Old World” have spent a hundred million years competing against a wide range of other beasts, gaining superiority in arms, armor, tactics and disease resistance.  Thus Old World rats and pigs and cats and dogs and snakes and rabbits and humans have done a fantastic job of ravaging Pacific islands. Australia is, compared to Africa/Eurasia, just a big island.  Worse, it’s a big island that, at least for koalas, it a whole lot of lifeless sand with only a fairly limited range for koalas. Set that range on fire and send in the rats and dogs, and cute little koalas are as doomed as a village of Ewoks sent up against *competent* Stormtroopers.

Koalas have the bad luck of being dependent upon eucalyptus leaves. This is bad because eucalyptus leaves are basically filled with oil. They don’t just burn, they burn with a vengeance. I’ve seen videos of eucalyptus trees virtually *detonating* when surrounded by wildfires.

Now, as to blame: in this case, the finger points directly at the anti-nuclear activists. Imagine a world in which not only had the US not abandoned nukes, but Australia and New Zealand and the like had adopted rational nuclear polices and were now obtaining the bulk of their electrical power from breeder reactors and thorium reactors. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would be far lower, the temperature would be lower, fires would likely be less dangerous. Better, with a few extra terawatts of power on tap, Australia could at this very moment be well along in a plan to scoop out the middle of the continent and turn it into a new sea. This would open up vast tracts of desert to bloom and greatly expand the range of critters like koalas. But instead… damn dirty Soviet-backed hippies won the day and doomed koalas to functional extinction.