Kangaroos are Eating One Another to Survive the Australian Drought, Ecologists Say

Australia’s big dry is approaching apocalyptic extremes. Huge swathes of the country’s eastern interior have been ravaged by wildfires; regional towns are having to import literal truckloads of water to keep the community going; and, according to ecologists, kangaroos have resorted to eating the stomachs and intestines of other, dead kangaroos in a desperate attempt to sustain themselves.

"We have seen a huge die-off of kangaroos over the past 12 months," independent ecologist John Read told the ABC. "So throughout central Australia, millions of kangaroos basically starved to death and people would have seen them dying on the roads and off the roads."

This large scale “die-off” can largely be attributed to the untenable conditions at play in certain parts of severely drought-affected Australia—where waterholes are drying up and plant matter is becoming increasingly difficult to come by—combined with an overabundance of many kangaroo populations. It’s thought that certain species are dying in their millions, and those left standing are growing more and more desperate for food.

Katherine Moseby, an ecologist at the University of New South Wales, has seen the increasingly dire situation unfold firsthand.

"Last summer, we had a massive die-off of kangaroos in all the areas where I worked in the arid zones but, in particular, some of the areas in the Flinders Ranges," she said. "We were seeing them going into the public toilets and eating toilet paper. We're even witnessing them eating the stomachs of dead kangaroos on the side of the road, trying to get some nutrition out of the corpses. It was really quite upsetting and quite horrible to watch."

This situation—when an overabundance of a particular animal species combined with a paucity of food to sustain them results in those animals turning to cannibalism to survive—is not without precedent in Australia. Five years ago, during a trip to the Snowy Mountains in Kosciuszko National Park, NSW, environmental academics Don Driscoll and Sam Banks observed that the area’s famous wild brumbies were facing such a shortage of food that they had resorted to eating one another.

In a piece for The Conversation, the authors described the scene of three brumbies standing alongside “a fourth horse lying dead on the ground. Two of the horses had their snouts inside its gaping abdominal cavity, nibbling at what little remained of its digestive tract.”

Driscoll and Banks suggested In that case that such nightmarish scenes were a consequence of the Kosciuszko National Park Horse Management Community Steering Group deciding against a strategy of culling by aerial shooting, choosing instead to trap horses using lures and mustering. It is thought that this strategy was ineffective in culling the brumbie populations, ultimately leading to an explosion in their numbers and resulting in “starving horses forced to scavenge the digestive tracts of their fallen comrades.”

Environmental disasters like drought only make matters worse. When prolonged dry conditions diminish the food supply, the result on abundant species can be catastrophic: leading to more mass die-offs of kangaroo populations, and more hungry survivors forced to feed on their carcasses.

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