On the table, unconscious and stretched out on a pillow, Joe Mangy looks deceptively peaceful. The koala’s watery, red-rimmed eyes are the only sign of the disease at war with his body.
Tubes snarl out of a mask covering his face as a vet tech listens to his chest with a stethoscope. He is not healing as well as they had hoped.
Eight days earlier, Joe Mangy – who is about two years old – was found wandering in the middle of a suburban road. Dazed and confused, eyes nearly glued shut with mucus, he was rushed here, to the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary’s hospital.
Enveloped by rainforest on Queensland’s Gold Coast, the park is full of koalas like this.
Outside the clinic, in a “Koala Rehab Centre” faintly perfumed by eucalyptus leaves, is a three-year-old recovering from a hysterectomy. “It saved her life… but she can’t reproduce,” the head vet Michael Payne says.
Another male koala stares blankly through narrowed slits. His left tear duct is so inflamed his eyeball is barely visible.
This hospital is ground zero of a grim chlamydia epidemic which is killing thousands of koalas and making even more sterile, pushing the national icons to the brink of extinction.
But it’s also at the core of desperate bid to save them with a vaccine – frustrated efforts which, after over a decade, are still tied up in regulation and running out of both time and money.
Biggest and deadliest threat
Even a few decades ago, spotting a koala snuggled in a backyard tree was nothing out of the ordinary. They were plentiful on the country’s populous east coast.
But in recent times the species has been in dramatic decline – in some places plummeting by 80% in just 10 years.
Land clearing and urbanisation are leaving the marsupials hungry and homeless, while natural disasters are drowning or cooking them en masse.
“[But] it’s the chlamydia that shot up tremendously – almost exponentially,” says Dr Payne, who has run the Currumbin clinic for more than 20 years.
“You get days where you’re euthanising heaps of koalas that just come in completely ravaged.”
Estimates vary greatly – koalas are famously difficult to count – but some groups say as few as 50,000 of the animals are left in the wild and the species is officially listed as endangered on most of the eastern seaboard. There are now fears the animals will be extinct in some states within a generation.
Dr Payne wistfully recounts “the early days” when his hospital only saw a handful of koalas a year.
They now see 400.