The Magnificent Absurdity of the Echidna
Endless Wonders George Sranko
A couple of days ago we had the joy of watching these fascinating creatures snuffling through the Aussie bush, blowing dust from their nostrils like spiky vacuum cleaners with clogged filters. And the whole time I'm thinking: here's a creature that doesn't follow the rules.
Consider this; echidnas lay eggs. Mammals shouldn't lay eggs. Echidnas question a stupid rule like that, when they know eggs work perfectly well. Female echidnas lay a single leathery egg into a pouch that only appears when needed. A temporary pouch. Evolution was absolutely making things up as it went along. Ten days later, out comes a puggle (yes, that's what they're actually called), blind, hairless, about the size of a jellybean.
This puggle has to find its mother's milk. But here's the thing... no nipples. The mother just secretes milk through pores in her skin, and it pools in grooves in the pouch. Amazingly, this “makeshift “ design, has worked for 166 million years!
Now, consider the tongue. Imagine a thin, turbo-charged spaghetti noodle, covered in sticky mucus, rapidly flicking out, slurping up ants and termites. No teeth, no chewing: just that magnificent tongue and a horny pad on the roof of the mouth to crush and swallow prey.
They also have a beak-like snout, spines, fur, and the metabolism of a creature that couldn't be bothered with conventional mammalian enthusiasm. Their body temperature runs at 32C while other mammals are burning calories to maintain 37 to 38. Echidnas?? "No thanks, sounds expensive."
They split from other mammals during the Jurassic period, when dinosaurs were still the main event. While other mammals were tiny and terrified, hiding in burrows and trying not to get stepped on, the ancestors of echidnas were already doing their peculiar thing. They survived the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. They survived ice ages. They survived the arrival of humans, for Pete's sake!
Australia broke off from Gondwana and drifted away, taking the monotremes with it. Without competition from placental mammals, echidnas just... persisted. They filled their niche, asking nothing from the universe except a steady supply of invertebrates and to be left alone.
Don't call them living fossils! They're not unchanged relics. They've been busy innovating. That pointy snout is packed with electroreceptors that detect tiny electrical fields from moving invertebrates.
Those spines are modified hairs that turned into defensive weaponry. When threatened, an echidna digs straight down and wedges itself in place with spines pointing out. Good luck moving one.
They're not evolutionary time capsules. They're ancient body plans with millions of years of upgrades, still adapting, still evolving, still making no sense whatsoever while being brilliant at survival.
And there they are, shambling through the Australian bush, still laying eggs, and breaking all the rules.
Magnificent little weirdos, every single one.
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