Where koalas live within their natural habitat range affects how they behave, researchers at Australia’s University of Queensland have found. Nicole Davies and her colleagues tracked 21 koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus) living in southwest Queensland, looking for differences among animals that lived at different distances from the area’s center. Overall, Davies’s team found that koalas living at the arid Western end of the natural range spent most of their time close to water sources, while their Eastern counterparts residing nearer to the temperate center varied more in their habitat use.
“The difference in home range movement patterns and resource use among the different koala populations shows that behavior changes with proximity to the arid edge of the koala’s range,” Davies and her colleagues concluded in their paper, published today (September 12) in Movement Ecology. “Changes in home range size and resource use near the range edge highlight the importance of further ...
