Baby Koala Clings to Mother During Surgery

Baby Koala Clings to Mother During Surgery after the latter was hit by a car on the Warrego Highway near Coominya, Australia.

Phantom, a baby koala, could not break away from his mother’s side, while she was going through a difficult surgery at Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital.

The baby koala’ mother, Lizzy, was injured in a car accident and she suffered facial trauma and a collapsed lung, which had to be drained. Fortunately, Fanthom managed to go unscattered, even though he too was involved in the accident together with his mother.

The Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital reported that the six months old koala baby, who weights not a gram over 420g, has been present at his mother’s side through the surgery, kept hugging her and showed her the emotional support she surely needed throughout the intervention and the following treatments which involve antibiotics.

“Phantom is with Lizzy during her procedures and check ups to ensure neither mum nor bub get stressed out,” said the hospital. It also said that she is doing well and is expected to make a full recovery.

The hospital has been treating over 58,000 wildlife patients in the course of almost eleven years of practice. A Koala treatment costs between $1500 and $5000 Australian dollars, on an average.

The koala is a native of Australia and it is the only extant representative of the family Phascolarctidee. The animal lives on coastal areas inhabiting Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia.

Some of koala characteristics are a tailless body, fluffy ears, a large face and a large, spoon-shaped nose. They are sedentary animals due to the fact that their nutritional and caloric intake is limited, feeding themselves mostly with eucalypt leaves.

Just like the kangaroo, the other Australian native, the koala is a marsupial, meaning that they give birth to under-developed babies who are kept in their mother’s pouches for the first six or seven months of their lives.

It might be this intimate upbringing that made Phantom to be so attached to his mother and we can only hope that his closed supervision and affection will help Lizzy toward a faster recovery.
Image Source: StarTribune