Monitoring koala bears, Australia

Volunteers investigate the ecology of the Koala by tracking, capturing and monitoring the Koala on St Bees Island. Despite their universal appeal, koalas are a bit of a headache for wildlife managers. That's because isolated pockets of koalas are running amuck in their fragmented habitats, threatening to destroy the very reserves intended to save them. On islands in South Australia, there are too many koalas; on the mainland, too few. But on St. Bees Island off Queensland, there appear to be just the right number.

Why are koalas stripping their eucalypt habitat on Victorian and South Australian islands but not on St. Bees Island? The answer could guide successful koala conservation and reintroduction efforts across Australia. A quiet volcanic isle fringed with reefs, rainforests, eucalypt woodlands, and dense grasslands, St. Bees offers a perfect laboratory for investigating how a healthy, unmanaged koala population works.

Koala experts Drs. Alistair Melzer (Central Queensland University) and William Ellis (University of Queensland) need your help conducting a detailed study of koala ecology here to include koala demographics, distribution, genetic diversity, health, and habitat use, and analysis of the plant community. After proper training, volunteers will be assigned to rotate through koala-capture, tracking, and field ecology crews.

Through a pioneering project you will hike all around the steep rocky island to help find, capture, weigh, measure, tag, and radio-collar individuals, track collared animals (sometimes at night to determine tree use), document forest and woodland composition, and collect and process plant samples. The researchers will calculate the metabolic rate of captured koalas and the moisture content of fodder leaves to establish how much koalas need to eat and how fast trees produce leaves, in other words, what the island's koala carrying capacity is. Expect hot and humid conditions in the austral summer (I), warm and dry the rest of the year. You will share rooms in a largely solar-powered cottage with hot showers and toilets. Meals are a shared endeavor, supplemented with fresh-caught fish whenever possible. In your free time, you can relax under palms on the beach, or snorkel and fish in the lagoon.