Koala Trivia
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58 free Koala trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This koala trivia quiz covers everything from the obvious (they are marsupials, not bears) to the genuinely weird: why the koala's brain floats in cerebrospinal fluid, why joeys eat their mother's 'pap', how a two-metre caecum lets it live on toxic eucalyptus, and why male koalas make a noise like a snoring, belching motorbike. You will also meet the koala in human history and culture: the 'New Holland Sloth' of 1810, the fur trade that killed millions in the 1920s, Blinky Bill, the drop bear hoax, Sam the koala from the Black Saturday fires, and the 'koala diplomacy' of the 2014 G20 summit. Conservation questions cover the 2022 endangered listing, chlamydia and the koala retrovirus. Every question was checked against a primary reference (mainly the Wikipedia articles on the koala and related subjects) and carries a citation, so it is safe to use for a classroom or pub quiz. Difficulty ranges from questions an eight-year-old will get to a few that will stump a zookeeper.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which koala feature so closely matches ours that experts can struggle to tell them apart under a microscope?
Fingerprints
Fingerprints arose separately in koalas and in primates, whose ancestors parted at least 70 million years ago; the Adelaide team that found them proposed they are an aid to grasping, and most of the koala's close relatives have none.
Q 02Which animals are the koala's closest living relatives?
Wombats
Both belong to the suborder Vombatiformes; kangaroos and possums are in a sister group.
Q 03Why do koalas sleep up to 20 hours a day?
Saving energy
Saving energy: eucalyptus leaves hold so few calories that a koala can afford to do little else, and the old tale that the leaves leave it drunk is a myth.
Q 04The name koala is popularly said to come from an Aboriginal word meaning what?
No drink
No drink is the popular gloss, since koalas get most of their moisture from leaves, but dictionaries trace the word only to gula, the animal's own name in the Dharug language, and koalas do drink in a drought.
Q 05The koala's genus name Phascolarctos combines the Greek words for 'pouch' and what?
Bear
Bear was a mistake that stuck: settlers took the stout, round-eared climber for a kind of bear and called it the 'native bear', and the scientific name simply put their error into Greek.
Q 06What do leaf-eating koalas sometimes climb down to eat?
Soil
Soil. A koala now and then climbs down to eat a little dirt or gravel, which is thought to aid its digestion or to supply minerals its leaves lack.
Q 07In which four Australian states are wild koalas found?
Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia
Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia. Hunting had all but wiped out South Australia's koalas by the 1920s, and most living there now descend from small groups introduced afterwards.
Q 08Southern koalas grow about twice as heavy as Queensland's, a difference thought to be an adaptation to what?
Colder winters
Colder winters. Extra bulk and a thicker, shaggier coat keep out the cold: Victoria's koalas top 10 kg, while North Queensland's weigh about half as much.
Q 09Which of a koala's organs is strikingly small for an animal of its size?
Brain
Brain. It is unusually small for a mammal of the koala's size, and researchers suspect a bigger one would be too costly to fuel on a diet of gum leaves.
Q 10What have zoologists reported a koala does when gum leaves are served loose on a flat surface?
Fails to eat them
Fails to eat them. Biologist Hugh Tyndale-Biscoe wrote that a koala feeds by drawing a branch to its mouth, and cannot respond when the same leaves arrive loose.
Q 11What helps a koala's front paws grip branches so firmly?
Two thumbs
Two thumbs. The first two digits of each front paw oppose the other three, so a branch is gripped evenly from both sides, and each hind foot adds a clawless, thumb-like big toe.
Q 12What unusual shape are the pupils of a koala's eyes?
Vertical slits
Vertical slits. Its ears are specialised too: an unusually large middle ear helps a koala catch the low bellows of other koalas across the forest.
Q 13Koalas ferment gum leaves in the hindgut, not the stomach, a digestive plan shared with which animal?
Horses
Horses. Cows, deer and goats ferment food in a chambered stomach; koalas and horses do it further along, the koala in a two-metre pouch called the caecum where bacteria break down the fibre.
Q 21What unusual structure lets koalas produce sounds far deeper than their size should allow?
Extra vocal cords in the soft palate
Extra vocal cords in the soft palate. Described in 2013, these folds let an 8 kg koala bellow about 20 times lower than its size predicts, a pitch more typical of an animal the size of an elephant.
Q 22About how long is a koala pregnant before her joey is born?
About 5 weeks
About 5 weeks. After 33 to 35 days the joey arrives blind, hairless and barely formed, and does nearly all of its growing in the pouch rather than the womb.
Q 23About how big is a newborn koala joey?
A jelly bean
Q 14Which organ does a koala rely on to neutralise the poisons in eucalyptus leaves?
The liver
The liver. It makes enzymes called cytochrome P450 that break down the oils and phenols in gum leaves, poisons that put almost every other mammal off eating them.
Q 15A 2014 study revealed why koalas press their bodies against tree trunks: to do what?
Shed body heat
Shed body heat. In hot weather the trunks were found to be much cooler than the air, so a koala resting against one can dump heat into the wood and needs far less evaporative cooling.
Q 16With hundreds of eucalyptus species to choose from, which sense does a koala mainly use to pick its leaves?
Smell
Smell. A koala pulls each branch to its big leathery nose and sniffs before it bites, which lets it reject leaves that carry too much toxin.
Q 17When are koalas mostly awake and feeding?
After dark
After dark. Koalas are mostly nocturnal, eating in four to six bouts, though they also doze for part of the night and sometimes stir by day.
Q 18Which US zoo got its first koalas in 1925, a gift from the children of Sydney?
San Diego Zoo
San Diego Zoo. The pair were named Snugglepot and Cuddlepie after storybook characters, and eucalyptus grows so well in the city's climate that the zoo raises its own leaves for its koalas.
Q 19Male koalas mark their trees using scent glands located where on their bodies?
On the chest
On the chest. The gland shows as a bare, stained patch on his pale front, and he rubs it against the trunk as he climbs to tell other koalas the tree is taken.
Q 20A male koala's bellow is often compared to which pair of sounds?
A snore and a belch
A snore and a belch. The snore is the breath in and the belch the breath out, and the low-pitched result carries far through the forest, where females pay more attention to bigger males.
A jelly bean. About 2 cm long and under a gram, it is born blind and hairless, yet its forelimbs are strong enough to haul it through its mother's fur to the pouch.
Q 24What stops a koala joey from falling out of its mother's pouch as she climbs?
A ring of muscle
A ring of muscle. It draws the opening shut like a drawstring bag, a useful safeguard because, unlike many pouches, a koala's does not open upward.
Q 25After outgrowing the pouch, how does a young koala travel with its mother?
Riding on her back
Riding on her back. After six or seven months in the pouch the joey climbs aboard and tries its first gum leaves from there, though it stays on her milk until about a year old.
Q 26What does a mother koala feed her joey to prepare its gut for eucalyptus?
A runny faecal 'pap' from her cloaca
A runny faecal 'pap' from her cloaca. It is a soft, special form of her droppings, and eating it for a few weeks passes on the gut microbes a joey needs before it can digest gum leaves.
Q 27A young koala usually stays with its mother until what happens?
Her next baby arrives
Her next baby arrives. A young koala stays close until its mother's following joey comes along, then sets off to find a home range of its own; if she skips a year, it stays longer.
Q 28A wild koala that reaches old age often dies because which part of its body wears out?
Its teeth
Its teeth. From about age six the molars that grind gum leaves start to wear smooth, and an old koala that can no longer chew its food properly slowly starves.
Q 29Steve Irwin opened Australia Zoo's wildlife hospital, which treats hundreds of koalas, in memory of which relative?
His mother
His mother. Lyn Irwin was a pioneer of wildlife care, and in her memory Steve and Terri turned an avocado packing shed into the hospital in 2004; by 2020 it had treated 90,000 animals.
Q 30The koala retrovirus (KoRV) can cause a syndrome compared with which human disease?
AIDS
AIDS. The virus can wear down a koala's immune defences in much the same way, and it seems to have spread from north to south: only southern populations still include virus-free animals.