Many marsupials raise their children in pouches that include Opossums, Tasmanian devils, and even koalas. Kangaroo Arguably the most iconic.
So what about inside the kangaroo pouch?
Rick Schwartz, an animal welfare director at the San Diego Zoo and a national spokesperson, think of a kangaroo pouch as a hoodie sweatshirt wearing backwards. The hood of the sweatshirt is the pouch, and the drawstring is the mother’s muscles that the mother uses to open and close. “If she wants, it’s pretty open,” Schwartz told Live Science.
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The inside of the pouch has the texture of kangaroo skin, but it is hairless. It’s soft and comparable to the skin on the inside of a person’s wrist, Schwartz said. The inside of the pouch is very warm, which is the same as the temperature of the mother. It is about 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40.5 degrees Celsius). This can cause you to sweat.
The pouch contains four nipples or ducts. If Mama Kangaroo gives birth to Joey from the vaginal canal 32 or 33 days after pregnancy, her baby is very underdeveloped. It’s about the size of a jelly bean and weighs less than a gram. Newborn Joey uses his forelimbs to crawl up to his mother’s pouch. There, it hangs on an elongated nipple, which inflates and pierces the baby’s throat and holds it in place for about three and a half to four months, Schwartz said.
Joey stays in the pouch for about four and a half to five months before appearing, then always stays close to his mother and begins his exploration before returning to the pouch. In the next few months, Joey will begin exploring farther and longer, becoming truly adventurous at about eight months of age. Joey weaned between 10 and 12 months, at which point he would no longer bounce off the pouch.
Joey spends a few months on the pouch before appearing, so it defecates internally. According to Schwartz, in the second half of development, Joey will track the dirt as the exploration takes place. In other words, mama kangaroos need to do housekeeping.To clean the pouch, she pierces her entire head and scrapes dirt and dung tongueWorking around a young Joey or kicking an old Joey while she is working.
Kangaroos give birth to only one Joey at a time. However, when they mate, the animal’s body refrains from transplanting embryos into the uterus if the conditions are not appropriate for raising the baby, for example if there is a drought. Then, when the time comes, the embryos will break out of dormancy and the mother will begin to become pregnant, Schwartz said.
He added that female kangaroos can give birth to up to four offspring in a year or more with just one mating. She may give birth to one Joey, after which her body delays the implantation of the next embryo until the first Joey spends the first few months outside the pouch. “Her body can produce the right kind of milk nutrients for the first eight months of life, and the other nipples can produce the right nutrients for the newborn,” he said.
Originally published on Live Science.
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