14 DAY TRIAL // This might come as a bit of a shock but, as it turns out, koalas don't go around hugging trees because they have this sick fascination with hearing the squeaky noises people make when they see them looking all cute and adorable while holding on to one branch or another.
On the contrary, koalas have evolved to be some of the world's most dedicated tree huggers in an attempt to have an easier time coping with rather unpleasant increases in the temperature of the regions they inhabit.
Simply put, koalas fall head over heels in love with trees and start hugging them for minutes on end in order to keep cool when things start to heat up, researchers argue in a paper published in the journal Biology Letters this June 3.
Specialist Michael Kearney with the University of Melbourne in Australia explains that, while monitoring such marsupials in the wild, he and doctoral student Natalie Briscoe found that, despite the fact that they chiefly eat eucalyptus, koalas would much rather hug acacia trees.
With the help of an infrared thermometer, Natalie Briscoe and Michael Kearney determined that the tree trunks the koalas they monitored hugged on a regular basis were about 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) cooler than the surrounding environment.
“As it got hotter the koalas went farther down the trees and started to really hug onto the tree trunks. That seemed strange to us until we figured out that the trees are a bit cooler,” Michael Kearney told Live Science in an interview.
In light of these findings, the specialists have concluded that, all things considered, the tree hugging behavior displayed by many koalas has little to do with enjoying a much-needed rest, as it was previously assumed, and quite a lot to do with regulating body temperature.
In their paper in the journal Biology Letters, Michael Kearney and Natalie Briscoe go on to explain that, by hugging trees in order to cool down, koalas manage to save significant amounts of water that they would otherwise lose through panting.
Therefore, it can be argued that these marsupials' tree hugging behavior is the perfect way to deal with an otherwise unbearable increase in outdoor temperatures while at the same time conserving the water that they get from feasting on eucalyptus and other plants.
For the time being, the specialists cannot say why it is that the trees koalas hug are cooler than their surroundings. However, they suspect that this is due to the fact that they suck in cool water from the underground and this keeps their temperature in check.