Echidna
© [2007] Jupiterimages Corporation
Echidnas have spikes.
Echidnas live in forests.
An echidna has a long sticky tongue to catch termites and ants.
Echidnas dig into the ground if they are chased.
The echidna belongs
to a special group of mammals called monotremes.
There are only three monotremes, two of them are echidnas. The
short-beaked echidna is found in Australia and the long beaked
echidna is found in New Guinea. The other monotreme is the platypus.
An echidna is covered with hair and with sharp spines on its back and sides. The spines protect the animal from enemies.
Echidnas grow to be about 40 centimetres long. They weigh about 8 kilograms.
The echidna has a snout and a long sticky tongue. It uses its tongue to lick up ants and termites. The echidna doesn't have teeth, but it has hard pads inside its mouth to grind up the ants and termites before swallowing them.
The echidna has long, sharp claws on its feet. It uses them to dig open ant and termite nests. It also digs rapidly into the ground to escape from enemies such as eagles, dingoes, and in Tasmanian, the Tasmanian Devil.
After mating, a female echidna digs a burrow, curls up her body, and lays one egg directly into her pouch. The egg hatches in about 10 days. Inside the pouch, the baby echidna drinks milk from its mother's body. When its spines start to grow, the baby leaves the pouch. The female will feed her baby until it's about 6 months old.
In the wild, an echidna can live for up to 16 years.
Find out more
about echidnas here:
http://www.dpiwe.tas.gov.au/inter.nsf/WebPages/BHAN-5357K5?open
Acknowledge this source
in your bibliography like this:
Thomas, R. & Sydenham, S. Echidna. [Online] www.kidcyber.com.au (2008)
updated © [2008] kidcyber