A baby echidna is called a 'puggle'.
Showing posts with label echidna. Show all posts
Showing posts with label echidna. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Cute or not? Baby echidna
A baby echidna is called a 'puggle'.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Meet echidna - the strangest creature evah!
Here's a long-beaked echidna, one of the oldest, rarest, shyest, silliest-looking mammals on earth.They lay leathery eggs, as reptiles do, but then feed the so-called puggles that hatch with milk — though drizzled out of glands in the chest rather than expressed through nippled teats, and sometimes so enriched with iron that it looks pink.
For reasons that remain mysterious, these monotremes have multiple sets of sex chromosomes, four or more parading pairs of XXs and XYs, or something else altogether: a few of those extra sex chromosomes look suspiciously birdlike.
Another avianlike feature is the cloaca, the single orifice through which an echidna or platypus voids waste, has sex and lays eggs, and by which the group gets its name. Yet through that uni-perforation, a male echnida can extrude a four-headed penis.
They are superior to humans at the other end of their bodies as well: Among humans, the neocortex that allows us to reason and remember accounts for 30 percent of the brain; in echidnas, that figure is 50 percent.
And while we're on the subject,
here's a short-nosed cousin:
blowing a mucus bubble through his nose as he recovers at Taronga Zoo's wildlife clinic in Sydney from injuries received during a road accident.AFP PHOTO/Greg WOOD
Source
Monday, November 10, 2008
Cute or not? Baby Echidna
Echidnas and the Platypus are the only egg-laying mammals, known as monotremes. The female lays a single soft-shelled, leathery egg twenty-two days after mating and deposits it directly into her pouch. Hatching takes ten days; the young echidna, called a puggle, then sucks milk from the pores of the two milk patches (monotremes have no nipples) and remains in the pouch for forty-five to fifty-five days, at which time it starts to develop spines. The mother digs a nursery burrow and deposits the puggle, returning every five days to suckle it until it is weaned at seven months.
(via cellar)
Photo credit: battyden
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