Human Senses 1. Smell and Taste (3 of 21)

Human Senses

We all have a remarkable ability to acquire a taste for things even if we hate them at first.
And that adventurous sense of taste gives us humans an amazing advantage.
Just imagine if we simply didn't take to new tastes.
What if we were like the pickiest animal on the planet?
Urm We've come to San Diego zoo to meet an animal that has a taste for just one kind of food.
Eucalyptus.
They only eat eucalyptus, only certain species of eucalyptus, only certain leaves on the end of the branches, and it has to be fresh.
And these animals will only eat a few kinds of eucalyptus.

Probably a little over 500 species of eucalyptus.
They will eat about 3 dozen out of those.
For breakfast it eucalyptus, for lunch its eucalyptus.
For dinner its eucalyptus again.
To us it's an incredible boring diet.
But it suits the koala just fine.
Koala it's an old aboriginal word which means no drink.
They don't even have to leave the trees to get water.
They get 90% of their moisture from the gum leaves that they eat.
The koalas get the eucalyptus trees to themselves.
Because few other animals can digest the leaves.
But they pay a high price for refusing to eat anything else.
They must rely on big stands of eucalyptus trees of just the right kind.
If they're cut down these guys have nothing to eat.