A baby echidna – one of Australia’s egg-laying monotremes – has been born and reared in a university for the first time. The baby, known as a puggle, was born earlier this month and has now been removed from its mother’s pouch for its first weigh-in. The scientists hope that, by researching this puggle and other echidnas, we will finally be able to understand some fundamental questions about the evolution of pregnancy in mammals.
The short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus), also known as the spiny anteater, has proved to be an extremely difficult species to breed in captivity. In spite of numerous attempts, a dedicated research colony had never been successfully established, though have bred the species.
Now, at Macquarie University in Sydney and his team are successfully rearing a puggle, which is thought to be the first in the world born at a university. This week, it had become big enough that they felt confident in temporarily removing it from its mother’s pouch for weighing, which 91av was invited to witness.
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T. aculeatus is one of only five known species of monotremes, a group of mammals that lay eggs. The others are three different species of echidna in New Guinea and the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus). Most researchers believe monotremes are an ancient mammalian lineage that predate placentals.
Studying the chemical composition of echidna eggs may reveal how different they are to those of reptiles, which could give clues on when mammals and reptiles diverged, says Griffith. “We’ll look at eggshell proteins in the echidna and compare that to eggshell proteins in reptiles and try to work out: do they have the same origin or did they evolve independently?”
Five females and four males are in captivity at Macquarie University. In early August, Griffith and his colleagues noticed that the puggle’s mother, named Kootear, had stopped eating and moving for around 10 days, a sign that birth is imminent. Pregnant echidnas move their egg into a pouch, where it incubates while the female is fasting and immobilised.
“We had an inkling that she may have laid an egg,” says Griffith. “So, three weeks ago, we looked into her pouch and we found what was a very tiny, almost jelly-bean-sized baby that had hatched only a couple of days before.”
A week later, the team checked the pouch again and found the puggle had surged in size. “It had grown a crazy amount actually, and it was surprising to see it so much bigger in just seven days,” says Griffith.
When it was checked for the third time, the researchers anaesthetised Kootear so the puggle could be briefly removed. They found it weighed 36 grams and was starting to look like an echidna, albeit one without any spines or fur.
“Before this point, you couldn’t obviously see it was an echidna – you might confuse it with a platypus puggle or, maybe even, just because it’s a pink thing, you might think it was a kangaroo baby,” says Griffith. “But today you could really see the shape of an echidna – the beak, the feet, everything.”
Echidnas can live for more than 50 years in captivity. The university’s echidnas are unlikely to ever be released into the wild. “This is a long-term research programme,” says Griffith. “I’ve set this up to be sort of a career’s worth of research, and this puggle may well outlive me.”
