In the midst of the unprecedented wildfire devastation in Australia, an unfathomable wildlife catastrophe occurred. The fires overtook 27 million acres of landscape and with it the animals that live there. Scientists estimate more than a billion individual animals have been lost on the Australian continent during the 2019-2020 bushfire season.
“We’re talking about not thousands of animals, not hundreds of thousands of animals, not millions of animals but billions of native animals lost,” said Chief Photographer of the Sydney Morning Herald Nick Moir.
The unique and rich biodiversity of Australia is unmatched worldwide. Many of the animals in the path of the expansive bushfires exist nowhere else in the world.
“So that means that Australia has an enormous custodial role to protect the biodiversity that’s here. Not only for the nation itself, but for the rest of the planet,” said David Lindenmeyer, an ecologist at Australia National University.