Like koalas, humans live in eastern Australia, too. Also like koalas, people need room-for houses, farms, parking lots, and so forth. To get space, Australians cut down trees. Humans have destroyed 80 percent of the forests where koalas once live Imagine having only 20 pieces of a 100-piece puzzle. It wouldn’t be a pretty picture. Now imagine a make koala trying to find a female whose home range is on the other side of a highway. Or imagine a koala losing half its food supply to a parking lot. Like those stray puzzle pieces, the remaining bits of eucalyptus forest are scattered. That makes it much harder for koalas to gather during mating season. And there’s nowhere to go if food runs out-or a fire starts. As a result, the koala population has plunged. The Australia Koalas Foundation (AKF) estimates that there were 10 million koalas before 1788. That’s when Europeans began moving to Australia. No one knows exactly how many koalas survive today. The AKF counts about 100,000. Other experts believe only about 40,000 remain.