Koalas spend 20 hours a day sleeping, and most of the rest eating.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That means they can only squeeze 10 minutes in each day to move between trees, according to a new study.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, this time on the ground is the riskiest part of their day, said Gabriella Sparkes, a PhD student at the University of Queensland, who led the study.<\/p>\n
Roughly two-thirds of koala deaths occur when they’re on the ground \u2014 mostly from dog attacks and vehicle collisions.<\/p>\n
“It’s this disproportionate amount of death on the ground when we’re talking about an animal that should be spending most of its time in the trees,” Ms Sparkes said.<\/p>\n
She presented the study today at the 2025 Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Belgium.<\/p>\n
Fitting koalas with pedometers<\/p>\n
Ms Sparkes and her team studied koalas around Pittsworth in Queensland, south-west of Toowoomba.<\/p>\n
“It’s a really agriculturally fragmented landscape,” she said.<\/p>\n
“You end up with tiny woodland patches, and then lots of strip vegetation along roads and along farms.”<\/p>\n
To understand how koalas spend their time, the researchers captured and fitted 10 animals with collars sporting GPS trackers and accelerometers.<\/p>\n
Accelerometers, which measure movement and speed, are also used in pedometers and phones to track steps.<\/p>\n
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The tracking collars weighed about 115 grams each. (Supplied: Dr Ami Fadhillah Amir Abdul Nasir, CC BY-NC-ND)<\/p>\n
Unlike GPS trackers, they don’t need satellite connections to log data, which is useful when you’re studying something that loiters under trees.<\/p>\n
This allowed the team to get much more granular data on koala movement than previous studies have allowed.<\/p>\n
“Going through a koala’s accelerometer trace, we could identify all the climb-downs and the climb-ups, and that really helped us pinpoint these ground visits,” Ms Sparkes said.<\/p>\n