ributed equally on some “first come, first serve” basis. They have a social hierarchy for determining who gets the prime real estate. Many factors contribute to this hierarchy. Age, sex, and social position are critical in deciding who gets the best and biggest home range. Maybe you’re thinking that humans are just primal for having the same kind of social hierarchy as koalas for deciding who gets to live where. However, koalas have been around for a lot longer than humans. They have been doing this for much longer than we have.
Koalas live in complex social groups. Contrary to popular opinion, they are not migratory animals but are highly territorial. The home range of each animal fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. A home range can consist of several home range trees and food trees, comprising the individual koala’s long-term territory. Within a socially stable group, individual koalas’ home ranges often overlap with those of their neighbors. The shared, overlapping trees house the majority of social interaction and are essential trees. Although not as apparent to the human eye, koalas can tell whether a tree belongs to another koala or not.
23. Koalas Have Stink Glands to Keep You Out Of Their Territory
Koalas are not highly interactive, but they are incredibly territorial. Male koalas have white patches on their chests. These patches are known as scent glands, but they are perhaps better known as stink glands. Mature males use these glands to emit a dark, smelly substance on any other koalas that might intrude on their territory. So there you have it. These nasty, evil little creatures enforce their social hierarchy and self-imposed isolation by spraying on each other, not unlike how a skunk may spray on anything in its path that may alarm it. Are you starting to change your mind about how cute they are?
The strong-smelling oily substance can be rubbed against trees to act as a marker for other koalas. The scent gland even appears to change over the koala’s life and over the course of a year. The scent glands in younger males appear to be smaller and to grow as they approach maturity. As the glands are ever-changing, they develop in different ways. Scent glands can appear dry at times and oily at other times. Different koalas have various shaped scent glands. Some of them are long, thin, and have a central crease. Others have an oval or keyhole-shaped gland.
For creatures that look so cuddly and snuggly, you might expect that they make cute little soft, warm sounds to each other. But if you have ever heard a koala make its characteristic call, known as a bellow, then you know otherwise. A bellow is a loud snore that is followed by a belch. The sound is far from appealing and might scare anyone off! The roar is just one in the koala’s arsenal of sounds, and I mean arsenal. If you are uninitiated to the sounds that a koala makes, then hearing them might scare the daylights out of you.
To a koala, the bigger the beast, the deeper its call. Most land-dwelling creatures produce their noises by expelling air through the voice box that causes vibrations in a couple of membranous flaps. However, koalas do things differently. Their croaking call was typical of an animal with a vocal tract that is almost the entire length of an adult koala. The low-pitched mating calls produced by the velar vocal folds can help others identify the caller and figure out his body size. Another extended thought theory is that female koalas utilize the bellow pitch as an honest signal of male quality.
Maybe you like salamanders, and that’s perfectly fine. However, you probably weren’t expecting those baby koalas, when firstborn, to look like lizard-like creatures. They are born long before they can survive independently, which is why they have to spend months inside their mothers’ pouch. When first born, baby koalas, known as joeys, are only about two centimeters long and are completely bald. They are also entirely blind deaf, as none of their organs have yet fully developed. However, it does have claws, as well as strong forelimbs, which allow it