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Comment by Supermancho | Hacker News Reader

I thought koalas were a borderline nuisance species...far more than 1000 koalas in Australia. Maybe less than 1000 outside Australia. Not sure how accurate this headline/story is.

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There seems to be some confusion between a population becoming extinct and a whole species becoming extinct. More information here. [1]

[1] https://theconversation.com/a-report-claims-koalas-are-funct...

Or perhaps the title of this article is intentionally ambiguous to make people click.

> Functional extinction is when a population becomes so limited that they no longer play a significant role in their ecosystem and the population becomes no longer viable. While some individuals could produce, the limited number of koalas makes the long-term viability of the species unlikely and highly susceptible to disease.

Restating the text is unhelpful and is an uncharacteristically thoughtless HN post. My lack of context was a missing distinction of the population boundaries. The population, when talking about extinction, is ubiquitously within the entirety of the species' home...not just some random patch. The headline is clickbait and the article is misleading, at best.

Koala's have very low numbers. You're probably thinking of Kangaroos, which are a nuisance species.

As per wikipedia:

> Since the 1990s, government agencies have tried to control their numbers by culling, but public and international outcry has forced the use of translocation and sterilisation, instead.[165]

Maybe nuisance is the wrong word, until you look at the Chlamydiaceae bacteria infection rates. You generally don't want to touch wild ones.

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