Here’s a heartwarming story about how people banded together to help Australia’s emblematic animal, and one of the world’s five cutest mammals. I refer, of course, to the koala (Phascolarctos cinereus). It turns out that, according to both the Guardian and the Times of London, the bushfires that have ravaged parts of south Australia have also killed or injured many koalas. Many of the injured animals have burnt paws, acquired while trying to hang on to blazing trees or to run across burning grass.
Here’s injured Jeremy getting preliminary treatment:
To save the beasts, their paws first need to be soaked and then, like burnt human hands, slathered with ointments and dressed, with the dressings changed daily to prevent infection. And that means that people had to make mittens for these marsupials. A call went out for custom mittens. And people responded, producing two types: a cotton mitten that looks like this:
. . . and knitted mittens that look like this:
So Aussie knitters went to work producing the specialized paw-wear. I was going to issue a call to readers for koala mittens and donations, which both newspapers said were badly needed, but, checking the website of the International Fund for Animal welfare, which coordinated the Koala Mitten Initiative, I see that there’s now a sufficient supply of these items. At the link you’ll see this adorable headline and the information below it:
Our Australia team’s call for koala mittens has been incredibly successful and we are now being inundated with mittens from thoughtful people all over Australia and as far afield as Europe, Canada and the US! Thank you to everyone who has dedicated their time to help we are incredibly grateful.
We’ve seen the rotten side of humanity this week, but there’s a good side, too. And these animals thank us for it.
h/t: Ian
Reblogged this on Jenniferhopewells141's Blog.
We are, after all, the ones ultimately responsible for the fires…the least we can do is try to patch up the survivors….
b&
Well said Ben 🙂
🐾🐾
Paws for effect?
Poor little paws! I’m glad people made them mittens. My mom made little sweaters for kakapos last year.
WHAT? They need sweaters?
Yeah for the babies I think. I think the were little tube things.
A Google search of this site didn’t help me so I’ll have to ask: What are the world’s five cutest mammals?
In no particular order:-
Cat, squirrel, cat, koala, cat, otter, cat, meerkat, cat, red panda, cat, giant panda, cat, chipmunk, cat, goat, cat, skunk & of course the cat…
😀
All correct except for the goat!
Goats are adorable!
One man’s goat is another man’s Monty Hall?
Aw, I can’t think of anything cuter than a Nubian kid:
http://waywardspark.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/DSC_0967.jpg
Awwwwwwww. Were these yours?
No, ours were cuter. 😀 But all of those pics are on film, somewhere in the bags of prints I’m going to put in albums “some day.”
I haven’t managed really organized photo albums since kid #2 was born. Kid #2 always wonders why hers are not as organized as kid #1’s. Lots of photos in shoe boxes…And now so many on my computer,or iPad.
I got through the 2nd kid’s toddler years with albums–12 of ’em, I believe–the rest of the prints are probably molding away…
I have a friend who carefully documented her first baby, but told me down the road that now she can’t tell whether some of her shots are of the 2nd or the 3rd baby…
I can imagine your friend’s problem but fortunately I have a dark-haired boy and a blonde girl so very easy to distinguish. The various black cats I’ve had are a different story…
That pumpkin-eating porcupine should be considered for induction to the Hall of Cute.
Don’t know about the other three, but two of them are Hili and Baihu.
I suppose, per today’s Hili Dialogue, Justinya can reasonably take a representative position for one of the remaining spots….
b&
So precious. Good humans!
Are the Koalas naturally tame, or from a place where they were human-habituated…or drugged? Or just in too much pain to put up a fuss?
Hi Diane,
Koalas are not tame. I suspect these ones are a bit tired and their claws are nicely covered with the bandages. Although the Koala doesn’t do much other than sleep, from their poor diet, I would not recommend walking up to one and trying to pick it up – they can be fairly fearsome when they chose!
The one thing about this fire I find hard to comprehend is that it is believed to have started from someone using their incinerator. I’ve lived in South Australia pretty much my whole life and you have to be totally clueless (or insane) to start an incinerator anywhere in SA this time of year. These poor animals were basically murdered and injured through sheer human stupidity.
Thanks, Guy. I suspected that might be the case.
Because the mittens in the last shot above give the impression of thumbs, I googled “koala paws.” What an interesting toe arrangement!
“These poor animals were basically murdered and injured through sheer human stupidity.”
Bad humans. Very, very bad humans.
Yes, two “thumbs”.
It’s like they’re slowly evolving into chameleons…:D (But then their front arrangement would be the opposite of what it is now…)
Still–convergent evolution, I suppose.
It’s certainly quite different than the foot of a eutherian.
Are there other metatherians with “two thumbs?”
Almost, but not to the same extent as the koala. Marsupial forelimbs are nearly all relatively> very conservative in morphology because they are used in locomotion immediately after birth when the newborn is still embryonic (by reasonable vertebrate standards).
The ‘normal’, ancestral condition is for the thumb to be slightly shorter and more divergent than adjacent digits but not really opposable, e.g. didelphids, most dasyurids, kangaroos, wombats etc.
Marsupial lions (Thylacoleo) and arboreal diprotodontids (Nimbadon) had single divergent thumbs that are thought to have been more or less opposable to digits 2-5, like ours, but in arboreal possums the second digit either curls up out of the way when the thumb (1) opposes 3-5 in a grasp, or is effectively a second thumb. Good picture of this in a living ringtail possum (Pseudocheiridae), and at this link (Fig.3, p.18) a (rough) drawing of the ringtail hand showing equally wide gaps between digits 1-2 and 2-3. Koala is a stage further than this, with 1-2 forming a tight unit deeply divergent from 3-5.
Since koalas are phylogenetically closer to wombats (and dips and thylacoleonids), and possums to kangaroos, there’s clearly been convergent evolution of this double opposability.
My gosh, you’ve certainly had your fingers in a lot of interesting pies!
That was fascinating reading. Thanks!
Reblogged this on Fairy JerBear's Queer World News, Views & More From The City Different – Santa Fe, NM and commented:
This week deserves a heartwarming story and here it is…
I was fortunate enough to have held one at the Carrumbin Wildlife Sanctuary in 2006. Beautiful animals. Perhaps it’s the horror of the pain associated with burns (3rd/4th degree burns are painful before the nerve signals are severed) but this story found me when I must have been in a particular emotionally susceptible state as I was terribly saddened.
I’m thankful, however, about the overall tone of optimism regarding our species’ response–even if we did cause it.
That does ameliorate some of my sadness.
Mike
My guess for the cutest 5 mammals: cat, dog, giant
panda, koala, and squirrel. 🙂
Baby bats have to be way up there!
Special mention to the Japanese flying squirrel.
Japanese dwarf flying squirrel. The Japanese giant flying squirrel is cute, but not nearly as much as the dwarf flying squirrel.
Humans can be so giving and kind… it warms our hearts after the atrocities that have lately occurred. Thank you for stories like this, they remind me that humanity is, for the most part, good.
Not trying to defend whoever accidentally/negligently started the fire, but I can’t help wondering whether such bush fires aren’t inevitable and natural in these conditions. That is to say, when the temperatures are off the clock, the humidity is zero, and everything is as stable as a bucket of nitroglycerine on a roller-coaster, whether the fire isn’t going to happen sooner or later from some cause or other anyway.
In particular, I wonder if such fires didn’t happen naturally all the time before European settlement, and they only seem so devastating now because people keep building their houses in the bush?
I believe (can’t remember the reference) that there are some species of plants that can only reproduce after a bushfire.
(The above are questions, not assertions – I genuinely don’t know the answers).
That said, and regardless of how the fires started, the mittens for koalas are heartening.
You are correct – seeds of some species of plants do need fire for germination – e.g. Australian Wattle. These seeds can be tricked into germination by burning a handful of twigs in a metal container and then placing the seeds in the hot ashes (when the fire has died down). The seeds then need to be transferred to moist sandy soil. (I understand that even dense smoke can trigger germination with some species.)
The compassionate responses to treating burned wildlife is heart warming.
Smoke-dependent germination is some cool science! Rather than actual hot ashes, nurseries have been using ‘smoke water’ for a while (hope it doesn’t smell as bad as bong-water though) but then somebody isolated the active compound and found that butenolide 3-methyl-2H-furo[2,3-c]pyran-2-one has the full stimulating effect on smoke-dependent seeds.
Can that be synthesized cheaply? (Or at all?)
Cheaper than bongwater? I doubt it a lot.
You’re certainly correct that there are considerable numbers of species (genera, even, perhaps) of plants that won’t germinate until after a fire. Not juts in Australia – there are arid-steppe type environments all over the world that have similar fire-dominated ecosystems.
Equally though, various types of human mis-management in several parts of the world have probably exacerbated the susceptibility of the environment to such fires. suppression of small fires for decades has in some areas increased the severity of fires when they do break out of control – which may then kill trees and shrubs that might have survived a pre-human typical small fire. Then you get into all the fun of soil erosion, species loss yadda yadda. Whole big mess that is hard to clear up, even if you don’t have humans mixing up their so-called “property rights” into the complexities of the natural environment.
Non-Australians (and Australian city dwellers for that matter) may not be aware that Koalas in the wild are cute but definitely not cuddly.
Their sharp claws are adapted for digging into bark to climb and they aren’t afraid to use them in defense. Which suggests a secondary purpose for those mittens.
Good point. 🙂
A bit like the Kiwi in that respect, I believe. Looks cute, comes with big feet and sharp claws.
And owls – so cute yet so ready to rip your face off.
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