Hi UG,
Lets call a truce here and stop hijacking Cloud's thread.
Maybe one day I will come and play with you in the politics forum. But probably not. Bruce is right, it just becomes opinion tennis pretty quickly. Let's stick to dick jokes and big vats of liquefied heads. They're fun.

Aliantha,
I've read the articles, (ok, skimmed the second one, it was real science). I will slightly revise my initial post: from "Koala numbers are falling in most of Australia, urban sprawl being the prime culprit". For "most" read "some". But I fear those "some" are the prime koala homelands, which for the same reasons, are the places humans want to live. And the fragmentation of populations can lead to problems.
Ecologically, frogs are much more important. But what tourist ever got themselves photographed with a frog?
But the good news is, koalas and humans can share:
These pics were taken in Adelaide in the heat wave of December 2005/January 2006, when temperatures went up to 45 centigrade (113 F) or so for several days in a row. Faces blacked because these are not my pics, not my kids, in fact I have no idea who they are.

You're correct about the fragmentation of the colonies. There's a big problem with inbreeding in some smallers ones which are cut off from others due to urban sprawl. Particularly in SE Qld. National parks are doing their best to move them around a bit so that this problem can be negated somewhat. Data about it's success is not readily available yet though due to the project being in its relative infancy.

Oh, oh... fragmentation of koala colonies, yes. Right. Ahem. :o

Zen, true, true.

Was that a joke UG?

Yes. Joke, self-deprecating, one each.

I thought so. It's always good to check though.

Fuck those koalas. If they are too lazy to learn to speak English, they deserve to be fragmented.

Can we eat them? I mean since they don't speak english we might as well make use of them as food.

http://www.culiblog.org/wordpress/wp....thumbnail.jpg

apparently they taste like a mouthful of gumleaves...so it's up to you.

Yuk. Green Gum Leaves. Is that the meat or just the fleshy part?

pretty much all parts.

Remember, you are what you eat. ;)

So I must taste like Guinness!

I must taste like red curry duck then...and rice and samosas and thai fish cakes.

Oh, God, not another woman that tastes like fish! Don't we have enough of those already?

:footpyth:

We don't eat them, we just pimp them out to all the foreign (mainly Japanese) tourists who want to have their photo taken holding one.
Seriously they are huge money spinners.