Echidna Facts, Echidna Pictures

When people unfamiliar with the existence of the echidna hear a description of it and its behavior, based on anatomical and physiological facts, their typical reaction is: “Impossible! Inconceivable!”

Toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, when naturalists were beginning to exchange information about monotremes— platypuses and echidnas—they had endless discussions that provided the reading public with great entertainment.
Even today, when there is so much more information available about them, people are still amazed at these primitive mammals. They are thought to be survivals from times so ancient that they still retain some reptilian characteristics. They have been the subject of volumes of more or less well- founded guesses, hypotheses and heated arguments by scientists.

Australia, the last habitable continent to be discovered by Europeans, confounded explorers by its unexpected fauna. The echidna is a striking example.

The echidna measures sixteen to twenty inches from the tip of its beaked snout to its tiny tail hidden under a thicket of pointed bristles. Its long tongue is conical and retractable, like that of the tropical American anteater. It has no teeth, but there are small fleshy excrescences on its palate. Mixed in with its fur are dense hard spines. Most of the spines are set in among the fur, but some, up to an inch or two in length, very thick and pointed, stand upright. The animal also resembles the American anteater in that it hunts for its food at night. It escapes danger by digging a hole in the ground. It eats ants, opening anthills with its claws.

The female lays a single egg with a membranons shell like those of reptile eggs, and hatches it in a pouch on her abdomen. In its first days the newborn infant feeds on its mother’s milk, which oozes out of a mam mary surface on the inside of her pouch. This fact is what causes scientists to classify the echidna among the mammals, although some see resemblances to the reptiles, especially since the body temperature of echidnas varies greatly in response to the temperature of the air around them.

When the baby echidna’s spines grow large enough to make the mother uncomfori able, she expels it from her pouch.
The male has a fleshy spur on its hind legs, like the male platypus. Few cases are in which this weapon has been used. The echidna seems to prefer an effective method of passive defence; it either rolls up into a ball, showing its spines to the enemy, or else it digs its way into the earth, disappearing rapidly. One captive echidna dug a two-foot deep hole in two minutes.

There are several kinds of echidnas found in Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea. The one that lives on the island of Tasmania is larger than the Australian echidna and has longer hair. The echidna of New Guinea is about thirty inches long, the largest of all.

Before Australia was colonized, the aborigines hunted the echidnas both for their meat and for their strong spines, which were used to make arrows.

Today the echidna has become rare and is protected by law. It can be seen in zoos. mouths, sabre-like teeth, elastic and extensible bodies that can swallow prey bigger than the predator itself: such are the characteristics of abyssal fish, genuine monsters as compared to the fish of the surface waters. And yet their seeming monstrosity is only due to the requirements of adaptation to the environment.

Among the representatives of the abyssal fauna, special mention should be made of Chauliodus sloani, first discovered two hundred years ago, quite accidentally. The discoverer was Sir Hans Sloane, an English physician and botanist of the eighteenth century.

“And here, ladies and gentlemen, is the extraordinary marine fish. As you see, it is a fish with a very long flat head. Please observe the enormous mouth with its mon teeth. When it is closed, these eight long sharp fangs, which are in addition to its normal complement of teeth, remain outside. The specimen that you see here, well preserved, is the second that has ever been found.”

This, more or less, was the little speech that one of the guides at the British Museum in London gave groups of visitors in 1806. In a small glass case and housed with great care, was the marine fish, known today by its scientific name of Chauliodus sloani. It is a monstrous-looking animal, like other inhabitants of the depths, but disappointingly small—only eight inches long— a tiny monster, all mouth and teeth. About a hundred have been caught with special nets, at great depths, in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean.

Echidna Pictures: