It’s an ecological Armageddon for Australia’s unique wildlife.

About 87 percent of Australia’s wildlife is endemic to the country, which means it can only be found on this island continent, and a great many of those species have populations living in the regions now being obliterated by the fires.

Ecologists at the University of Sydney have estimated that this year’s fire season have either killed or badly injured 480 million animals, including birds, mammals and reptiles. That number doesn’t include insects, frogs or bats.

By any measure, the fires have been devastating, not only for the koala, which ecologists believe has lost a quarter of its population in northern New South Wales, but also for the lesser-known and just as unique southern brown bandicoot and the long-footed potoroo. The entire distribution of the potoroo, a kind of wallaby, is on the south coast, the very area being eaten up by flames.

Because the fires this season have been so intense and consumed wetlands as well as dry eucalyptus forests, there are few places many of these animals could seek refuge, said Jim Radford, a research fellow at La Trobe University in Melbourne. “We’ve never seen fires like this, not to this extent, not all at once, and the reservoir of animals that could come and repopulate the areas, they may not be there,” he said.

Seal and penguin colonies on Kangaroo Island are at risk from uncontrolled fires. Fish and frogs where ash has blanketed waterways may not survive. And it will take a decade for certain trees to produce the nectar so many fruit bats and flying foxes (another variety of bat) rely on.

“Small populations might have been wiped out entirely,” Dr. Radford said. “It really is an ecological Armageddon.”