Nat Hab's 2024 Guest Photo Contest

Species: The Short Beaked Echidna | Location: Kangaroo Island, Australia

One of the most unusual animals we found was the Echidna. It along with the Platypus are monotremes, which are egg laying mammals and marsupial.

The female lays a single, leathery egg once a year. She rolls the grape-sized egg into her belly pouch and 10 days later, a baby “puggle” hatches. Unlike other mammal mothers, the echidna does not have nipples. Smaller than a jellybean, the puggle uses its tiny, transparent claws to grip the pouch hair and lap up milk secretions from her “patches"

At about 53-days-old, when the puggle’s spines emerge, the mother moves the baby into a burrow for seven months, until it can feed for itself..

The Echidna dig for it's food with it's nose and claws. The nose is not cartilage but bone for better digging. The Echidna’s six-inch “fast tongue” slurps up a variety of insects and larvae. Since they have no teeth, hard pads at the base of the tongue and on the roof of the mouth grind their prey into a paste. The short-beaked is blanketed with dark insulative fur and shielded by beige and black two-inch barbless spines that provide excellent camouflage and defense. With its long claws, the echidna tears through termite mounds and breaks apart hard topsoil to burrow deep underground.

The life span in the wild is about 50 years.