Could you imagine eating the same food for your whole life? How boring! Now imagine if that one food were poisonous? Yuck! Koalas do exactly that; they eat the leaves of a tree called Eucalyptus every day. Eucalyptus trees have poisons in their leaves that prevent most animals from eating them, but not koalas! Now that is a cool characteristic of a superhero! But how can they survive on nothing but poisonous leaves? Well, it turns out there are special microbes in the tummies of koalas that work really hard to break down the poisonous parts of the leaves into smaller pieces that cannot hurt the koala. Most of the microbes in the koala's tummy are just hanging out, a good example of commensalism. This means that these microbes are not helping break down the poisons, but they are not hurting the koalas either. One microbe that can break down the leaves, Lonepinella koalarum, is an important poison-fighting sidekick and forms a mutualism with koalas. Scientists are still learning about these microbes that serve as sidekicks to their koala superheroes.

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MPAA: G
Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2018.00050