Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna rediscovered in Indonesia | Hacker News Reader

Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna rediscovered in Indonesia

cbc.ca

191 pointscurmudgeon2252 comments

I didn’t realise there was a fourth species

I had to rescue a horny short nosed one which had trapped itself between gutters on a high speed road while looking for a mate a few years ago

These things are STRONG. The spikes aren’t much of a concern if you’re trying to pick one up, but it’s essentially a sphere of pure muscle and bones

If you tangle with an Echidna Warrior, get ready for a fight.

Highlight of my Australia Zoo visit was seeing a zookeeper holding an echidna like a baby and feeding her honey.

> I had to rescue a horny short nosed one which had trapped itself between gutters on a high speed road while looking for a mate a few years ago

Love a good dangling modifier. Did you end up finding your mate?

He found a horny echidna, I think he found a new mate.

> I didn’t realise there was a fourth species

Hang on, which are you calling the fourth?

A popular pub-trivia question is how many types of (living) monotremes are there - two (echidna and platypus).

However if the question is how many (living) monotreme species - then (well, up until now) the answer was four - the platypus, plus three species of echidna (Western, Sir David's, and Eastern).

BBC article on the same news:

"Of the four echidna species three have long beaks, with the Attenborough echidna, and the western echidna considered critically endangered."

We need references stay!

Ah, thanks - I hadn't gone reading other news sites about this article, and had assumed GP was referring TFA, but couldn't see anything that might have inspired that comment.

Though I did note that TFA used the misleading (or simply wrong) phrase:

"A different echidna species is found throughout Australia and lowland New Guinea."

Very tough, and they hang on tight to the ground when you go to rescue one that's in a dangerous place. But possibly the only Australian native animal that you don't have to worry about being bitten, kicked, clawed or envenomed.

>but it’s essentially a sphere of pure muscle and bones

that's kind of how handling a large male basset hound is.

I had this happen as well. My trick is to pour water on them. They get a suprise and then are easy to scoop up and move to the bush close by.

They're rather delightful. I went into the NSW bush and was disappointed at the lack of snakes and spiders the size of dinner plates, but I saw an echnida doing its own thing and spent half an hour just watching its slow and methodical path.

The egg laying by the females is interesting. But what’s four times as interesting is the structure of the male’s business end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echidna

> Male echidnas have a four-headed penis. During mating, the heads on one side "shut down" and do not grow in size; the other two are used to release semen into the female's two-branched reproductive tract. Each time it copulates, it alternates heads in sets of two. When not in use, the penis is retracted inside a preputial sac in the cloaca. The male echidna's penis is 7 centimetres (2.8 in) long when erect, and its shaft is covered with penile spines. These may be used to induce ovulation in the female.

Holy crap. Tell me again why the heck are we so interested in trying to find aliens when we have plenty bizarre stuff walking the earth with us?

Because the aliens are already here, just like the echidna...

With plenty of bizarre stuff on earth, my pet peeve is having aliens depicted as anthropomorphic.

That's what I thought the first time I went snorkeling in tropical waters.

It's too bad population seems to crowd out the majority of wildlife on the ground.

If it wasn't for birds, a majority of people wouldn't see much backyard wildlife, ever.

The back legs of an echidna face backwards too!

https://ielc.libguides.com/sdzg/factsheets/short-beaked-echi...

> Kempton's team survived an earthquake, malaria and even a leech attached to an eyeball during their trip

Yeeeash...

Yeah, that one really stood out to me, though leech eyeball guy has a great story for life.

Worth it. Boss hugged me when we found out the camera caught an echidna.

Named after Sir. David Attenborough no less. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67382235

I hope Indonesians start appreciating more what they have. Although I doubt this is possible without significantly improving their living standard first.

There is open wildlife trade on the Sunday market near my place. Birds, monkeys, lizards, snakes, sugar gliders, and some unknown to me "things".

The nearest police office is about 20 meters from it.

Export of "exotics" to markets in EU & USA is rampant from Indonesia. CITES protection is often not enough

Rare monotreme rediscovered in *Indonesian-occupied West Papua.

Merdeka!

Everybody says echidna is cool, it lays eggs, echidna is this, echidna is that... nobody aws about the poor lowland streaked tenrec

Echidna part of local folklore for thousands of years. Attenborough comes along making a tv show. Gets named after him.

I wonder if they'll be able to get a breeding pair in captivity somehow, or at least ensure a prospering stable wild population...

Apparently nobody has ever been able to persuade any Echidna species to breed in captivity, so capturing any would reduce the chances for the species as a whole

but we still have to try, to get anywhere

That conflict resolution method is pretty creative. Thanks for posting!

Seems like it would be an easy meal for all sorts of predators.

apart from being covered in spines, living in a burrow, and only coming out at night?

Semi-terrestrial shrimp.

This animal would be so much more obscure if it weren't for Sega's publicity campaign [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuckles_the_Echidna

Wow I had no idea Knuckles was supposed to be an echidna! Ha

Knuckles is the only reason I know that there is an actual animal called an echidna

Same

Echidnas are known to essentially everyone in Australia. I would say most bushwalkers I know have seen them before as they are not difficult to find. It surprises me that they are not so well known outside Australia.

Strange to see West Papua plainly described as Indonesia.

It’s a great video. The feeling of euphoria is very real and in the vast and in the isolated jungles of Maritime South East Asia there is a little thrill knowing just how isolated you are.

On an island. In a jungle. Miles from the airport via river and foot. On a mountain.

> Strange to see West Papua plainly described as Indonesia

Yeah I did a double take on this too.

Is the strange part that they used the (politically designated) country name rather than the (geographically oriented) island name? This seems normal to me, as journalists frequently describe locations by political names.

Who calls the area West Papua? The Indonesians seem to refer to it as "Western New Guinea", and "Papua" seems to be an antiquated term used to refer to some part(s) of the island of New Guinea.

It is a politically fraught issue because there is a long-running independence movement,[1] which the parent comment may have been obliquely referring to.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Papua_Movement

> Who calls the area West Papua?

The natives of West Papua who are being genocided out of existence by their colonial overlords in Indonesia.

Given the geography of Indonesia, it seems necessary to use more specific place names, like we do for Borneo or Galapagos. The term 'Indonesian' becomes meaningless in many contexts because the scope is so vast.

Everyone in my part of Kalimantan calls it Papua -- never heard a native refer to it as New Guinea

When I was in Borneo (the only island in the region with three countries occupying parts of it), unless what we were doing was related to a national government, we said Borneo. When my colleagues who were working in Sulawesi referred to their work, I never once heard “Indonesia”.

Yet, and I have seen this story a few times now, it has exclusively been with the term Indonesia.

With a country as big and diverse as Indonesia the island/islands one is working on does matter.

So it seems deliberate to avoid naming the geographic term. And it is controversial.

Worth noting also its east of the Wallace Line [0] which generally separates Asian (west) from Australasian (east) species

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Line

Has the article been updated? I was thinking “West Papua” might refer to the province but I can’t find the term in the article at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Papua_(province)

> The echidna is embedded in the local culture, including a tradition that states conflicts are resolved by sending one party to a disagreement into the forest to search for the mammal and another to the ocean to find a marlin, according to Yongsu Sapari elders cited by the university. Both creatures were seen as so difficult to find that it would often take decades or a generation to locate them. But once found, the animals symbolized the end of the conflict and a return to harmonious relationships.

If only all worldly conflicts could be resolved so peacefully.

Do we know which conflicts were resolved by this sighting?

The console war between SNES and Sega Genesis is hereby resolved with the sighting of Knuckles the Echidna.

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