Mammals · plate 15 of 60
Koala
Phascolarctos cinereus
Asleep in a tree, with excellent fingerprints.
Only 3.2% of people are Koalas. (estimated)
If you're a Koala
You are low-energy, affectionate, and attached to a very small territory. Koalas sleep most of the day to digest a diet that would poison most other animals and move between a few favorite trees; you also have a short list of places and people and no desire to extend it. You are easy to like. You are hard to get out of the chair.
A koala's fingerprints are so like a human's that they can be hard to tell apart under a microscope.
The Koala as a spirit animal
You are gentle, loyal, and extremely consistent. You pick a few things and stick with them for life, and you don't see why anyone would need more. The flaw is that the list is very short, the energy is very low, and the world occasionally requires you to climb down. You are not stubborn. You are simply on a diet that leaves nothing over for ambition.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with a Koala
Do
- Come to them; a koala's whole world is a few trees and it is not expanding.
- Accept the nap as a biological necessity, not an opinion about you.
- Offer the one thing they like; variety is not the point.
Don't
- Don't try to broaden their diet, their schedule or their circle.
- Don't underestimate the grip; koalas hug trees hard and let go slowly.
When it goes wrong: A disturbed koala makes a surprisingly deep bellow and can bite and scratch; give it the tree back and leave.
The Koala in a relationship
You love steadily and with little drama. Koalas are solitary and meet briefly in the breeding season; the mother carries the joey in her pouch and then on her back for about a year. You are not a grand romantic. You are a warm weight that stays put, which some people wait a lifetime for.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 2
- Boldness
- 2
- Energy
- 1
- Curiosity
- 1
- Devotion
- 7
- Roaming
- 1
- Koalas sleep around twenty hours a day because eucalyptus leaves are low in energy and high in toxins that take effort to break down.
- A koala joey eats a special soft faeces from its mother, called pap, to pick up the gut bacteria it needs to digest eucalyptus.
- Koalas are not bears; they are marsupials whose closest living relative is the wombat.
Koalas in literature
- The Koala — Dot and the Kangaroo, Ethel C. Pedley (1899)
- The koala — Arcana; or, The Museum of Natural History, George Perry (1810)
- The koala — The Mammals of Australia, John Gould (1863)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Koala's. If you got Koala, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other mammals
WolfRed FoxBrown BearPolar BearLionTigerLeopardCheetahElephantGiraffeHippopotamusGorillaOrangutanSlothKangarooPlatypusOtterBeaverBadgerRaccoonHedgehogBatCamelDolphinSperm Whale
Among the 60
Mammalia: Their Various Orders and Habits, Louis Figuier (1870). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
