Breeding 'super koalas' – disease-free, diverse genetically – for species survival at Cleland park in Adelaide hills
With Australia's preeminent koala veterinarian Dr Ian Hough, Koala Life foundation chair and founder professor Chris Daniels (pictured) came up the concept for breeding disease-feer genetically diverse koalas at Cleland Wildlife Park in the Adelaide hills.
A koala breeding programme that began at the Adelaide hills Cleland Wildlife Park in 2021 had the vision of no less than ensuring the survival of the species.
Behind the vision was Koala Life foundation (formerly The International Koala Centre of Excellence) set up in 2018 and supported by science and research “to ensure koalas do not disappear within our lifetime”. With northern koalas (Queensland, New South Wales, Australian Capital Territory) rated endangered and long-term threats to southern koala (South Australia, Victoria), fears for the koala weren’t overblown.
Besides habitat loss for a creature with a highly-selective diet, diseases (chlamydia, retrovirus, mange) were the other great threat to koalas. This swung the focus to Cleland Wildlife Park, the only sanctuary-managed koala colony free from both chlamydia and koala retrovirus in Australia and one of the very few dual-disease-free populations in South Australia. Cleland thus become the site for a breeding programme as a survival strategy for the species.
The breeding programme started with 28 healthy koalas brought to Cleland from Kangaroo Island in the wake of the 2020-21 summer fires that had severely cut its thriving population. Elsewhere in the wild, South Australia’s koalas had extremely low genetic diversity and disease, especially the kidney-related oxalate nephrosis, was widespread, threatening their long-term survival.
To overcome South Australia's lack of genetic diversity a group of male koalas was brought from Victoria’s Strzelecki Ranges in Central Gippsland to Clelald Wildlife Park in December 2021. The four males from Victoria weren’t yet adults, making them disease-free as chlamydia and retrovirus were largely sexually transmitted.
The environment departments of the South Australian and the Victorian governments worked together on the delicate, strictly-ruled and complicated (added by Covid-19 virus) operation of removing the male koalas from the Strzelecki Ranges to breed with the healthy population at Cleland.
The “super koala” breeding programme was the concept started by Koala Life’s chair and founder, professor Chris Daniels, and Australia's preeminent koala veterinarian Dr Ian Hough.
The breeding programme was the basis of a wider approach to what Daniels called survival science. This wider approach went beyond saving habitat to looking at a whole range of factors such as pest and weed control, revegetation, with the input of citizen science, against the backdrop of climate change.
