Scientists have long wondered how Australia's koalas get enough water to live. A new study pan answer.
The lead writer of the new report on koalas is Valentina Mella of the University of Sydney. It was earlier t, she explains, that the animals got most of the water they needed in the leaves they ate.
In the wild, koalas get water from the plant leaves they eat. But they also get it from water rdown from the trees during it rains. Mella and other scientists wkoalas in the wild every year. They find that koalas are aat night. They live in trees and depend on them for food, drinking and also for resting places.
Koalas spend most of the time high up in the trees. They eat lots of leaves. An adult koala neats between 0. 5 and 0. 8 kg of leaves a day, Koalas sleep about 20 hours a day. Mella notes that a koala usually spends 98% of its in trees. She also notes that the only time they come down to the ground is to danother tree with better leaves.
In fact, the word "koala" means "no drink" in the language. Koalas did not go down onto the ground very often. So it was considered that they had no need to drink water.
The koalas' living eis getting worse now because the fires from September 2019 to January 2020 in Australia have burned about 30% of the forests where they live.
