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Online posts claim that a drop bear – a vicious mythical Australian animal, said to resemble a koala – was fed human blood to survive. The posts, shared tens of thousands of times, contain an image purporting to show a woman giving red liquid to a fluffy fanged animal. The claim is false; the image has been doctored from an AFP photo of a koala at a sanctuary in Brisbane, Australia, in 2007. Drop bears do not exist; they have been described by US multimedia site National Geographic as a modern hoax. An image containing text and a picture of a woman using a syringe to deliver the liquid into the mouth of a koala-like creature has been shared in multiple posts across social media. For example, this Facebook post has been shared more than 33,000 times since it was uploaded by a page with nearly 26,000 followers on November 2, 2014. Orphaned drop bear cub being fed human blood to survive, reads the text above the picture in the misleading post. The Australian Museum explains the drop bear myth on its website here : The Drop Bear hoax tells of a large, arboreal, predatory marsupial related to the Koala that 'drops' on its prey. Below is a screenshot of the Facebook post: Screenshot of the misleading post The text below the image states: Drop Bear Attack Survivors groups are up in arms over a local zoo’s adoption of an orphaned Drop Bear Cub. The razor-sharp-fanged, red eyed, vicious baby killer requires three times its own body weight in raw meat and its preferred meal of fresh human blood per day to sustain it. To put things in perspective, that means that three other animals have to die to keep this vicious, yet very cute carnivore alive and at least a litre of human blood from The Red Cross Blood bank is being diverted away from people that may need it for transfusions. The zoo in question yesterday refused to comment. The same photo with a similar claim has also been published here on Facebook; here on Twitter; here on Pinterest and here on image sharing site Imgur. The claim is false; the photo has been doctored from an AFP photograph of a koala published on November 9, 2007. Here is the photo on the AFP Forum website. The caption of the AFP photograph states: Kern Nilsson, head koala keeper at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary, feeds one-year-old sick koala 'Doodlebug', in Brisbane 09 November 2007. The koala is much smaller for his age and is being hand-raised because of a pouch infection in her mother at the wildlife sanctuary. AFP PHOTO/William WEST Below is a comparison of screenshots of the photo in the misleading post (L) and the AFP photo (R): AFP also published a separate photo taken on the same day showing the same person and koala. Below is a screenshot of that photo: Do drop bears exist? National Geographic ruled out their modern existence in this March 11, 2016, article, which states, in part: There are no carnivorous koalas with a taste for human flesh hanging around the eucalyptus trees of Australia. Yet, despite the fact that the drop bear is a modern hoax, that the mythical animal’s description closely matches a very real animal that prowled Australia during the last Ice Age. Paleontologists and fossil fans know this beast as Thylacoleo carnifex, the ‘marsupial lion.’ Published in James Cook University’s eTropic journal in 2017, this paper titled Man-Eating Teddy Bears of the Scrub: Exploring the Australian Drop Bear Urban Legend states: Urban legends are contemporary forms of folklore that are often used to provide lessons in morality or explicate local beliefs, dangers, or customs. In Australia, one such tale describes fiendish, carnivorous, blood-sucking koala-like animals that launch themselves from trees at unsuspecting tourists in the Australian scrub. The drop bear (also known as Thylarctos plummetus or Thylarctos plummetus vampirus) is an urban legend common to tropical Australian scrub regions that serves as a cautionary tale intended to warn against the dangers associated with traversing the Australian bush. As such, the figure of the drop bear represents a uniquely Australian manifestation of the vampire motif.
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