Music festival destroying local koala population

Australia's Byron Bay Bluefest is currently suspect to a recent decline in the bay's local koala population. After a recent study from Biolink Ecological Consultants, researcher Dr. Stephen Phillips has told The Guardian that he believes the loud noise from the music festival is causing stress on the koalas and forcing them to move, which is the alleged leading cause of this spike in number of deaths. You can read a snippet of the official report from The Guardian below.

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“Phillips was contracted by the festival to study the animals in 2010, when it first moved to its current site. Since then, the festival contracted other ecologists, and Phillips said their reports to council demonstrated the initial population had almost been wiped out.

'What used to be a very robust population is now no more,' Phillips said.

In a paper published this month in the journal Australian Mammalogy, Phillips showed the koalas were disturbed by the noise of the festival and uncharacteristically moved outside their home area, away from the noise, during the festival.

Of the seven koalas tracked with radio collars, the three that resided within 525 metres of the stage moved outside of their usual home range – something koalas tend not to do. And three other koalas that lived slightly further from the festival also moved away from the music, but stayed within their home range.

'Those sorts of actions are very costly for a marsupial like a koala,' said Phillips.

'Koalas don’t tend to move large distances because their diet of eucalyptus contains very little energy. The stress from the noise and being forced to move can make them more susceptible to disease', he said. 'In addition, moving out of their home area along the ground can make them prone to attacks by wild dogs as well as aggressive interactions with other koalas.'

After the 2010 festival headlined by Crowded House and Jack Johnson, two of the tracked koalas died – one named Renee and one named Sonny Boy. Their cause of death couldn’t be established, but Phillips said he thought it was caused by the music. To confirm that, he said the animals’ stress hormone levels during the festival needed to be studied.

Byron Bay Bluesfest denied the noise was a significant problem for the koalas, and put the deaths down to disease and wild dogs, which they said they were trying to eradicate.”