The Echidna Is Australia’s Most Delightfully Different Mammal
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
This strapline is bound to generate some... interesting Knuckles fan art.
I had the good fortune of seeing a female echidna, licking honey from a bowl held by a caretaker, at the Australia Zoo shortly before departing. They are truly fascinating critters, cute in their own way.
Might have to wait a few metres away for a few minutes, see if they continue in away from the road.
Last year I learned from the mainstream media that echidna penises have four glans (heads). Researchers from the Universities of Melbourne and Queensland and Monash University studied the structure. An article [0] in Melbourne Uni's magazine gives a technical overview and refers to the peer-reviewed paper [1].
They only use two at a time. The researchers speculate that two can rest while the other two are in use, outcompeting proto-echidnas with fewer glans.
On a sad note, the research studied echidnas injured in road accidents, handed in to the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary on the Gold Coast, that had been euthanised. I imagine the numbers available are the result of the rapid urbanisation in the area.
[0] https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/solving-the-mystery-...
I just moved to Sydney and saw them at the Taronga zoo... and I'd never even heard of one before. Strangest little creatures.
The /r/sydney subreddit is regularly full of reports of people spotting them when the Echidnas are more active during mating season.
And the Tasmanian Devil, one of the nastiest looking little creatures on 4 legs I've ever seen.
They're adorable.
I advocate for their domestication to anyone who'll listen.
They're known to be very tame and friendly with in a short duration of repeated human closeness.
Sure, an adult Devil could bite your hand off, but so can a dog, and Devils tend to prefer already dead things.
My "contact" was limited to watching one run around and around his cage at some zoo or animal preserve. He certainly looked plenty pissed off.
> He certainly looked plenty pissed off.
Wouldn't you?
Human efforts at eradication left them with such low genetic diversity that contagious cancer became a thing.
> Once deposited into a hessian sack for processing, devils tend to sit very still and let you do anything with them, including opening their mouth to check for devil facial tumour disease (DFTD) – all while wide awake and not anaesthetised! Every single person who has witnessed this incredibly calm, still behaviour from wild devils has been astounded at how easy they are to handle, how relaxed they appear lying on the biologists’ lap, and how biologists still have all their fingers after opening the devil’s mouth wide like a dentist!
[1] https://cosmosmagazine.com/nature/tasmanian-devil-australian...
I'm willing to bet all adult mammals will exhibit similar behaviour in the right circumstances for them, they had to have been capable of being passive and calm in order for their mothers not to kill them.
Devils are know to bite their own family’s faces off. Even people trying to conserve their population dislike handling them directly.
They are horrible critters … they don’t seem to serve a purpose in the wider ecosystem other than nastiness…
> Intravenous access was obtained and 15 mg of morphine was given slowly. Over the next five minutes very little pain relief occurred.
> [...]
> A further 7.5 mg of morphine was given intravenously 15 minutes after the first dose, but again this produced little relief. Over the ensuing 15 minutes a further 7.5 mg of morphine was injected intravenously, which eventually reduced the pain to a tolerable level.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.5694/j.1326-5377....
That said, a decent amount of painful stuff exists in Australia, so I wouldn’t be surprised; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides springs to mind.