Greetings from Australia!
My name is Bill Ellis and I am a new researcher. I am working with Fred Bercovitch, the Division Head of Behavioral Biology at CRES, studying the behavioral ecology of koalas in Australia. I have only been working on the project for two months so far, so there is a lot to do and not a lot of results to talk about - but don't tell the boss that!

Over the next few years we hope to unravel secrets of the mating strategies male and female koalas employ to make sure that they raise as many young as they can. Our study site is an island some 15 miles (24 kilometers) off the coast of Mackay in Queensland, Australia and I will be spending quite a lot of time there.

The koalas we are studying are from the same subspecies as those housed at the San Diego Zoo, so other than a few different shades of coat colour, they look exactly the same.
Fortunately, most of Cyclone Larry (we have cyclones, in the U.S.A. they are hurricanes, I believe) went to the north of the island, so other than plenty of rain and some rough weather, the island was spared any ill effects.

I am currently writing a report on the prevalence of infection with chlamydial disease on the island. The koalas at St. Bees do have the disease, but appear healthy and rarely suffer any effects. Maybe this is because their laidback island lifestyle is low stress, but these are some of the things we are aiming to investigate.

My next trip to the island is at the beginning of May, when I will be leading an Earthwatch Expedition there. During that trip we will be monitoring the activity of the koalas intensively through the daylight hours. As some people know, koalas often spend long hours doing relatively little, so the excercise of monitoring them can be somewhat tedious. However, although they sit quietly, they are not always asleep during the day and I am interested to see how they move around in the canopy of the tree in response to day temperature and sunlight. I have a student who is looking at the microclimate of koalas to find out how much they can use their surroundings to modify their exposure to cold or heat. This work all began a while ago when I was watching a koala on a very hot day. It was holding onto the trunk of a large eucalypt tree (E. tereticornis). Although the day was hot, the tree's trunk was cool, so I wondered if the koala might use the tree as a heat sink, but that is another story.

For now, I am doing a lot of writing and reading and I guess the koalas are sitting back, relaxing until my next visit, when they will come under some close scrutiny…….

Dr. Bill Ellis is a Conservation Research Fellow at the San Diego Zoo's department of Conservation and Research for Endangered Species (CRES).

Here's more information about Bill's project.

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