The mammal with the lowest blood temperature is the Australian echidna. Not a malicious echidna at all. Natural enemies of the echidna and methods of defense.

Echidna. And this is not “name-calling” at all. This is a rare and amazing animal -. A plump and nosed creature with a long tongue. Born from an egg, but feeds on milk.

Australian echidna refers to mammals. The name is translated from Greek as “quick tongue” or “prickly.” Hearing an approach or rustling, the animal becomes motionless and differs little from environment. This report talks about an unusual animal that looks like it because it has both fur and spines.

Description

The Australian echidna has a dark brown coat with stiff, erect hairs. On the back and sides there are large quills, like those of a porcupine, black at the ends and yellowish at the base, 5-6 cm in size.

The inconspicuous and small tail, 1 cm in size, is also covered with a bunch of needles.

An adult animal measures only 40-60 cm in length and weighs 5-7 kg. Instead of lips and nose - elongated snout-proboscis, raised upward. There are no teeth, and the echidna's mouth is so small that it is not able to open it to grab prey. The echidna sticks out 15 centimeters or more the tongue is sticky and long, and again he is sucked in only with the food stuck to him.

It has powerful and strong, short paws with claws. The widest and very long claw is on the 2nd toe of the hind legs, which is approximately 3-4 times longer than the rest. Scientists have thought a lot: why does the echidna need such a long “tool”? It turned out to be for the toilet. Behind prickly coat the mammal is difficult to care for. She cannot lick, as is customary among animals. The soft “palms” of the echidna are also not suitable for cleaning; the animal can injure itself with sharp needles. These long claws of the hind legs help her clean the fur that grows between the needles.

How does he live and what does he eat?

The Australian echidna is a nocturnal and very secretive animal. Sleeps all day so follow her in natural nature very difficult to observe. It has excellent hearing and sense of smell, but poor eyesight.

• Echidna lives in burrows. She digs them for herself dense thickets shrub vegetation. The animal's nutritional menu includes ants, invertebrate worms and mollusks. The echidna is an excellent swimmer, but runs poorly.

During extreme cold weather, the Australian echidna hibernates. At the same time, fat reserves under the skin allow the animal to go without food for a month or more. They settle down to rest under stones, under the roots of vegetation, and in the hollows of fallen trees.

Australian echidna fast hides from its pursuers by burying itself in the ground. Rolling up into a ball is another way of protection. An alarmed animal makes sounds reminiscent of grunting.

How does it produce offspring?

Once a year female lays a single egg. It is the size of a large pea and has a soft shell. The animal lies on its back and, pushing the egg with its snout, rolls it along its abdomen into the pouch that appears on its abdomen. After 10 days, a baby emerges from the egg, naked and completely without spines, weighing half a gram. Echidna mother feeds the baby very thick milk, which forms on the skin of her abdomen. The baby licks it with his long tongue and grows very quickly. After 2 months, the animal already weighs 400 g, its weight increases a thousand times. The baby's stay in the pouch is now dangerous because of the needles that are starting to grow, and the female is especially for him digs a "children's" hole. It comes to feed the cub once every 5-10 days and does this for up to 6 months.

The Australian 5 cent coin features a “portrait” of an echidna. Funny Millie, also an echidna, was the symbol of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

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Australian echidna (lat. Tachyglossus aculeatus) is a mammal with the lowest blood temperature

The taxonomy of echidnas is quite confusing; some reference books say that there are 5 species. However, scientists now believe that there are only two echidnas - the echidna (Zaglossus bruijni), which lives in New Guinea, and the echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus), common in Australia, on the island of Tasmania and on the islands in Bass Strait.

Despite the fact that the echidna is very widespread on the “fifth continent”, it is one of the most mysterious Australian animals. The echidna leads such a secretive lifestyle that many features of the biology of this animal are still unknown to researchers.

European scientists first learned about the echidna in 1792, when a member of the Royal Zoological Society in London, George Shaw (who also described the platypus a few years later), wrote a description of this animal, mistakenly classifying it as an anteater.

The fact is that this amazing big-nosed creature was caught on an anthill. The scientist did not have any other information about the biology of the animal. Ten years later, Shaw's compatriot, anatomist Edward Home, discovered one common feature- both of these animals have only one hole at the back leading to the cloaca.

And the intestines, ureters, and genital tracts open into it. Based on this feature, the order of monotremes (Monotremata) was identified.

But, in addition to the presence of a cloaca, echidnas and platypuses have one more fundamental difference from all other mammals - these animals lay eggs.

Scientists discovered such an unusual method of reproduction only in 1884, when Wilhelm Haacke, director of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, noticed a well-developed pouch in the female of this animal, and in it a small round egg.

The echidna and platypus also have a whole series of common features, for example in the structure of chromosomes. In monotremes they are represented by two types - large (macrosomes), similar to the chromosomes of other mammals, and small (microsomes), similar to the chromosomes of reptiles and not found at all in other animals.

But outwardly, the echidna and the platypus are completely different. The echidna is an animal with a body weight of 2 to 7 kg and a length of about 50 cm. Its body is covered with coarse hair and prickly needles, the length of which reaches 6–8 cm. The echidna’s neck is short, and its head ends in a long cylindrical “beak”.

Just like the platypus, the echidna’s “beak” is a very sensitive organ. Its skin contains both mechanoreceptor cells and special electroreceptors. They perceive weak changes in the electromagnetic field that occur during the movement of small animals - the echidna's prey.

Such electroreceptors have not yet been discovered in any other mammals, except the echidna and the platypus.

The mouth opening is located at the end of the echidna's beak. It is very tiny, but the animal’s mouth contains a long, up to 25 cm, sticky tongue, with the help of which the echidna successfully catches its prey.

The echidna's short and strong front legs are equipped with powerful curved claws, with which it tears apart termite mounds. Interestingly, these animals can swim well!

In addition, on the hind limbs of adult male echidnas a small spur is noticeable - like a platypus, but much less developed and not associated with a poisonous gland. The tail is short, there are either no ears at all, or they are very small, and the eyes are small - vision does not play a leading role in the life of the echidna.

In search of food, she relies mainly on her sense of smell, and to escape from enemies - on her hearing. The echidna's brain is better developed than that of the platypus, and has large quantity convolutions

These animals, as already mentioned, live very secretively. So much so that, for example, the reproductive characteristics of echidnas remained unknown until very recently.

Only relatively recently, after painstaking work in the laboratory and more than ten thousand hours of observation of spiny animals in nature, scientists managed to penetrate the secrets of their family life.

It turned out that during the courtship period, which lasts for echidnas all winter - from mid-May to mid-September, the animals stay in groups of up to seven individuals each, feeding and resting together. Moving from place to place, animals follow each other in single file, forming something like a caravan. At the head of the caravan there is always a female, behind her is the largest of the males, and the chain is completed by the smallest and, as a rule, the youngest animal.

Out of period mating games Echidnas lead a solitary lifestyle, and for a long time It remained a mystery how males find females during the breeding season. It turned out that chemical signals play a major role in this process - in mating season The animals emit a very strong musky odor.

After about a month life together the echidnas that make up the group decide to move on to more serious relationship. More and more often, one or the other male, and sometimes several, immediately begin to touch the female’s tail with their snouts and carefully sniff her body.

If the female is still not ready to mate, she curls up into a tight, spiky ball, and this position cools the ardor of her gentlemen for some time. The female echidna, who has come into heat, on the contrary, relaxes and freezes, and then the males begin to dance around her in a kind of round dance, throwing lumps of earth aside.

After some time, a real trench 18–25 cm deep will form around the female - people have been racking their brains for a long time over the origin of these strange circles on Australian soil!

But let's return to the echidna wedding ceremony. At some point, the largest male turns his head towards the next one and tries to push him out of the trench. The pushing competition continues until there is only one winning male left in the trench.

Finding himself finally alone with the female, he continues to dig the ground, trying to make the “marriage bed” more comfortable, and at the same time excites his chosen one, stroking her with his paws. Mating lasts about an hour and consists of the male pressing the opening of his cloaca to the female’s cloaca, frozen in love ecstasy.

21–28 days after this, the female, having retired to a special brood hole, lays a single egg. It's as small as a platypus egg and only weighs about 1.5g - the same as a pea! No one has ever seen how an echidna moves an egg from the cloaca to a pouch on its stomach - its mouth is too small for this, and its powerful clawed paws are too clumsy.

Perhaps the female bends her body so deftly that the egg itself rolls into the pouch.

A brood burrow is a warm, dry chamber often dug under an anthill, termite mound, or even a pile of garden debris near human structures and busy roads. In this hole the female spends most time, but sometimes she comes out to feed - after all, the egg is always with her, safely hidden in her bag.

Tiny, measuring 13–15 mm and weighing only 0.4–0.5 g, the cub is born after 10 days. When hatching, it has to break the dense three-layer shell of the egg - for this purpose a special horny bump on the nose is used, an analogue of the egg tooth in birds and reptiles.

But the echidna does not have real teeth at any age - unlike a small platypus that has recently hatched from an egg. The eyes of a hatched echidna are rudimentary and hidden under the skin, and the hind legs are practically undeveloped. But the front paws already have well-defined toes and even transparent claws.

It is with the help of the forelimbs that the small echidna moves from the back of the pouch to the front, in about 4 hours, to where the area called the milk field, or areola, is located. In this area, 100–150 individual pores of the mammary glands open. Each pore is equipped with a special hair bag, which differs in structure from the bag of ordinary hair.

When the baby squeezes these hairs with its mouth, food enters its stomach - although previously it was believed that it simply licks off the secreted milk.

Young echidnas grow extremely quickly, increasing their weight by 800–1000 times in just two months, reaching a mass of 400 g! In order to provide the cub with the necessary amount of milk, the female is forced to devote most of her time to searching for food.

Echidnas feed mainly on ants and termites, which they get by tearing them apart with their powerful claws earth and termite mounds. These animals do not disdain other insects and earthworms. And although the echidna has no teeth, there are horny teeth on the back of its tongue that rub against the comb palate and grind its prey.

With the help of its tongue, the echidna swallows not only food, but also small pebbles, which, when they enter the stomach, serve as millstones for the final grinding of prey - similar to what happens in birds.

The baby echidna remains in the mother's pouch for about 50 days - by this age it simply no longer fits there and, in addition, it develops spines. After this, the mother leaves him in the hole and comes to feed him once every 5–10 days - but the amount of milk that the cub receives during one such feeding is about 20% of his body weight!

This continues for almost another 5 months. In total, the feeding process takes almost 200 days. Therefore, the echidna can only reproduce once a year. But low speed reproduction is compensated for by a long life expectancy in these animals.

The reliably known record of longevity of an echidna in the wild is 16 years, and in the Philadelphia Zoo one echidna lived for 49 years - almost half a century!

The Australian echidna is common in Australia and Tasmania and is not an endangered species. It is less affected by land clearing, since the Australian echidna has no special requirements for its habitat, other than a sufficient amount of food.

Echidnas tolerate captivity well, but practically do not reproduce. It was possible to obtain offspring of the Australian echidna only in five zoos, but in none of the cases did the young live to adulthood.

The Australian echidna is featured on the 5 cent coin and on the 1992 AUD 200 commemorative coin. Millie the Echidna was one of the summer mascots olympic games 2000 in Sydney.

Lives in Australia strange beast- it looks like a porcupine, eats like an anteater, lays eggs like a bird, and bears children in a leathery pouch like a kangaroo. Such is the echidna, whose name comes from the ancient Greek ἔχιδνα “snake”.

Description of the echidna

There are 3 genera in the echidna family, one of which (Megalibgwilia) is considered extinct. There is also the genus Zaglossus, where prochidnas are found, as well as the genus Tachyglossus (Echidna), consisting of a single species - the Australian echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus). The latter was discovered by the British zoologist Georg Shaw, who described it oviparous mammal in 1792.

Appearance

The echidna has modest parameters - with a weight of 2.5–5 kg, it grows to approximately 30–45 cm. Only the Tasmanian subspecies is larger, whose representatives outgrow half a meter. The small head smoothly transitions into the body, studded with hard 5–6 cm needles consisting of keratin. The needles are hollow and colored yellow (often complemented by black at the tips). The spines are combined with coarse brown or black fur.

In animals poor eyesight, but excellent sense of smell and hearing: the ears pick up low-frequency vibrations in the soil emitted by ants and termites. Echidna is smarter than her close relative platypus, since its brain is more developed and mottled a large number convolutions The echidna has a very funny face with a duck beak (7.5 cm), round dark eyes and ears invisible under the fur. The full length of the tongue is 25 cm, and when capturing prey, it extends 18 cm.

Important! The short tail is shaped like a protrusion. Under the tail there is a cloaca - a single opening through which the animal’s genital secretions, urine and feces come out.

Echidna does not like to show off his life, hiding it from strangers. It is known that animals are unsociable and absolutely not territorial: they live alone, and if they accidentally collide, they simply disperse in different directions. The animals do not dig holes or arrange personal nests, but spend the night/rest wherever they have to:

• in scatterings of stones;
• under the roots;
• in dense thickets;
• in the hollows of fallen trees;
• rock crevices;
• burrows left by rabbits and...

This is interesting! In the summer heat, the echidna sits out in shelters, since its body is poorly adapted to the heat due to the absence of sweat glands and extremely low body temperature (only 32 °C). The vigor of the echidna comes closer to dusk, when it feels cool around.

But the animal becomes lethargic not only in the heat, but also with the arrival of cold days. Light frost and snow force them into hibernation for 4 months. If there is a shortage of food, the echidna can starve for more than a month, using up its reserves. subcutaneous fat.

Types of echidnovas

If we talk about the Australian echidna, we should name its five subspecies, differing in their habitats:

• Tachyglossus aculeatus setosus – Tasmania and several Bass Strait islands;
• Tachyglossus aculeatus multiaculeatus – Kangaroo Island;
• Tachyglossus aculeatus aculeatus – New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria;
• Tachyglossus aculeatus acanthion – Western Australia and Northern Territory;
• Tachyglossus aculeatus lawesii – New Guinea and parts of the forests of north-east Queensland.

This is interesting! The Australian echidna adorns several series of Australian postage stamps. In addition, the animal is depicted on the 5 Australian cent coin.

Lifespan

Under natural conditions, this oviparous mammal lives no more than 13–17 years, which is regarded as a fairly high indicator. However, in captivity, the lifespan of an echidna almost triples - there were precedents when animals in zoos lived up to 45 years.

Range, habitats

Today, the range of the Echidnovidae family covers the entire Australian continent, the islands in Bass Strait and New Guinea. Any area where there is an abundant food supply is suitable for echidna housing, be it a tropical forest or bush (less often - desert).

The echidna feels protected under the cover of plants and leaves, so it prefers places with dense vegetation. The animal can be found on agricultural lands, in urban areas and even in mountainous areas where snow sometimes falls.

Echidna diet

In search of food, the animal never tires of stirring up anthills and termite mounds, stripping bark from fallen trunks, and exploring forest floor and turn over stones. The standard echidna menu includes:

• ants;
• termites;
• insects;
• small shellfish;
• worms

The tiny hole at the tip of the beak opens only 5 mm, but the beak itself performs very important function– picks up weak electric field signals coming from insects.

The echidna’s tongue is also noteworthy, having a speed of up to 100 movements per minute and covered with a sticky substance to which ants and termites stick. The circular muscles (by contracting, they change the shape of the tongue and direct it forward) and a pair of muscles located under the root of the tongue and lower jaw. Rapid influx blood makes the tongue tougher. Retraction is assigned to 2 longitudinal muscles.

The role of missing teeth is played by keratin denticles, which grind prey against the ridged palate. The process continues in the stomach, where food is ground by sand and pebbles, which the echidna swallows in advance.

Natural enemies

The echidna swims well, but does not run very quickly, and is saved from danger by defensively. If the ground is soft, the animal burrows deep, curling up into a ball and aiming its ruffled spines at the enemy.

It is almost impossible to get the echidna out of the hole - resisting, it spreads its needles and rests with its paws. The resistance is significantly weakened in open areas and hard soil: experienced predators try to open the ball, aiming towards the slightly open belly.

The list of natural enemies of the echidna includes:

• dogs ;
• foxes;
• monitor lizards;
• feral cats and dogs.

People don’t hunt the echidna because its meat is tasteless and its fur is completely useless for furriers.

Reproduction and offspring

The mating season (depending on the area) occurs in spring, summer or early autumn. At this time, the animals emit a tart musky aroma, by which males find females. The right to choose remains with the female. Within 4 weeks, she becomes the center of a male harem, consisting of 7-10 suitors, relentlessly following her, relaxing and dining together.

This is interesting! The female, ready for intercourse, lies down on the ground, and the suitors circle around her and dig the ground. After a short time, a ring ditch (18–25 cm deep) forms around the bride.

Males push like wrestlers on the tatami, trying to push competitors out of the earthen trench. The fight ends when there is only one winner left inside. Mating occurs on the side and takes about an hour.

Gestation lasts 21–28 days. Future mother constructs a burrow, usually digging it under an old anthill/termite mound or under a pile of garden leaves near human habitation.

The echidna lays a single egg (13–17 mm in diameter and weighing 1.5 g). After 10 days, a puggle (baby) hatches from there, 15 mm tall and weighing 0.4–0.5 g. The newborn’s eyes are covered with skin, the hind limbs are almost undeveloped, but the front ones are equipped with fingers.

It is the fingers that help the puggle migrate from the rear section of the mother's pouch to the front, where it searches for the milky field. Echidna milk is pink due to its high concentration of iron.

Newborns grow quickly, increasing their weight to 0.4 kg in a couple of months, that is, 800–1000 times. After 50–55 days, covered with thorns, they begin to crawl out of the pouch, but the mother does not leave her child without care until he is six months old.

At this time, the cub sits in a shelter and eats food brought by the mother. Milk feeding lasts about 200 days, and already at 6–8 months the grown echidna leaves the hole for independent life. Fertility occurs at 2–3 years. The echidna reproduces infrequently - once every 2 years, and according to some sources - once every 3-7 years.

Echidna- a unique creation of nature. It's really true! The origin of these unique animals has been studied very superficially and many questions about their life are controversial and are still considered open.

• By appearance The echidna looks like a hedgehog or, it also has almost the entire body covered with needles;
• the echidna lays eggs to continue its kind, which is more typical for birds;
• she carries her offspring in a special bag, just as kangaroos do;
• but she eats in the same way as.
• Moreover, echidna cubs feed on milk and belong to the class of mammals.

Therefore, they often talk about the echidna as a “bird beast”. Look at photo of echidna, and much will become clear at just one glance. What kind of special creation is this, who is this viper?

Echidna and platypus belong to one order, which are known as monotremes (single-tremes). In nature, there are 2 varieties of echidna:

• spiny (Tasmanian, Australian)
• woolly (New Guinea)

The surface of the body is covered with needles, the length of which is about 6 centimeters. The color of the needles varies from white to dark brown, so the color of the animal is uneven.

In addition to needles, the echidna has brown wool, she is quite rough and tough. The coat is especially thick and quite long in the parotid area. In terms of size, the echidna is a small animal, about 40 centimeters.

Pictured is a woolly echidna

The head is small in size and almost immediately merges with the body. The muzzle is long and thin, and it ends in a small mouth - a tube, which is often called a beak. The echidna has a long and sticky tongue, but it has no teeth at all. In general, the beak helps the animal navigate in space, since vision is very poor.

The echidna moves on four legs; they are small in size, but very strong and muscular. She has five toes on each paw, which end in strong claws.

This unique miracle of nature, like , can curl up and turn into a prickly ball. If there is some source of danger or threat to life nearby, then the echidna buries itself in the loose soil with half of its body and puts out its needles as protection so that the enemy cannot get close to it.

Often you have to escape from danger and run away; here strong paws come to the rescue, which ensure rapid movement to reliable shelter. In addition to being a good runner, the echidna can also swim well.

Character and lifestyle of the echidna

Lives the echidna in Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania. The life of the echidna was first described by Georg Shaw in 1792, and it was from that time that observation of this animal began. However, echidnas are quite secretive and do not like interference in their lives, which greatly complicates study and research.

Not in vain word“snide” means insidious. Yes and animal echidna insidiously and carefully, does not allow intrusion into his life. Australian echidnas prefer to lead night look life.

They live mainly in forests or areas with dense vegetation, where the animal feels protected under the cover of foliage and plants. The echidna can hide in thickets, tree roots, crevices in rocks, small caves, or in holes that are dug and.

The animal spends the hottest hours of the day in such shelters; with the onset of evening, when the coolness is already well felt, the echidnas begin to behave active life.

However, with the onset of cold weather, the animal’s life seems to slow down and for some time they can go into hibernation, although in general the echidna does not belong to the class of animals sleeping in winter. This behavior of the echidna is associated with the absence of sweat glands, so it does not adapt well to different temperatures.

With a significant change in temperature, the animal becomes lethargic and inactive, sometimes completely inhibiting the process of vital activity. The reserve of subcutaneous fat provides necessary nutrition the body for a long time, sometimes it can last about 4 months.

The photo shows an echidna in a defensive pose.

Reproduction and lifespan

The breeding period, the so-called mating season, occurs during the Australian winter, which lasts from May to September. At other times, echidnas live alone, but with the onset of winter they gather in small groups, which usually consist of one female and several males (usually there are up to 6 males in one group).

The so-called dating period lasts for about a month, when the animals feed and live together in the same territory. After which the males move on to the stage of courtship of the female. This is usually manifested by the animals sniffing each other and poking their noses at the tail of the only female representative of their group.

When the female is ready to mate, the males surround her and begin a kind of wedding ritual, which consists of circling and digging a trench about 25 centimeters around the female.

The photo shows an echidna with a tiny egg.

When everything is ready, the battles begin for the title of the most worthy, the males push each other out of the trench. The only one who will defeat everyone and mate with the female.

About 3-4 weeks after mating has occurred, the female is ready to lay an egg. Moreover, the echidna always lays only one egg. The echidna's pouch appears only at this time, and then disappears again.

The egg is the size of a pea and is placed in the mother's pouch. How exactly this process occurs is still debated by scientists. After about 8-12 days, the baby is born, but for the next 50 days from the moment of birth, it will still be in the pouch.

Pictured is a baby echidna

The mother echidna then finds a safe place where she leaves her baby and visits it about once a week to feed it. Thus another 5 months pass. Then the time comes when echidna children ready for independent adult life and no longer needs maternal care and care.

The echidna is capable of reproducing no more often than once every two years, or even less often, but its natural life expectancy is approximately 13-17 years. This is considered quite high rate. However, there have been cases when echidnas in the zoo lived up to 45 years.

Echidna food

The echidna's diet includes termites, small worms, and sometimes baby fish. To get food, the echidna digs up an anthill or termite mound, rips off the bark of trees where insects hide, moves small stones under which worms can usually be found, or simply combs through the forest floor with its nose from leaves, moss and small branches.

As soon as prey is found, a long tongue is used, to which the insect or. To crush prey, the echidna lacks teeth, but it digestive system it is designed in such a way that it has special keratin teeth that rub against the palate.

This is how the process of “chewing” food occurs. In addition, grains of sand, small pebbles and earth enter the echidna’s body, which also help grind food in the animal’s stomach.

The taxonomy of echidnas is quite confusing; some reference books say that there are 5 species. However, scientists now believe that there are only two echidnas - rascal (Zaglossus bruijni) , living in New Guinea, and the echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus), common in Australia and Tasmania. It's about Australian echidna and that's where our story goes today.

Despite the fact that the echidna is very widespread on the “fifth continent”, it is one of the most mysterious Australian animals. The echidna leads such a secretive lifestyle that many features of the biology of this animal are still unknown to researchers.

European scientists first learned about the echidna in 1792, when a member of the Royal Zoological Society in London, George Shaw (the same one who described the platypus a few years later), wrote a description of this animal, mistakenly classifying it as an anteater. The fact is that this amazing big-nosed creature was caught on an anthill. The scientist did not have any other information about the biology of the animal. Ten years later, Shaw's compatriot, anatomist Edward Home, discovered one common feature in the echidna and the platypus - both of these animals have only one hole at the back leading to the cloaca. And the intestines, ureters, and genital tracts open into it. Based on this feature, a detachment of monotremes was identified (Monotremata).

But in addition to the presence of a cloaca, echidnas and platypuses have another fundamental difference from all other mammals - these animals lay eggs. Scientists discovered such an unusual method of reproduction only in 1884, when Wilhelm Haacke, director of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, noticed a well-developed pouch in the female of this animal, and in it a small round egg.

The echidna and the platypus also have a number of common features, for example in the structure of chromosomes. In monotremes they are represented by two types - large (macrosomes), similar to the chromosomes of other mammals, and small (microsomes), similar to the chromosomes of reptiles and not found at all in other animals.

But in appearance, the echidna and the platypus are completely different. The echidna is an animal with a body weight of 2 to 7 kg and a length of about 50 cm. Its body is covered with coarse hair and prickly needles, the length of which reaches 6-8 cm. The echidna’s neck is short, and its head ends in a long cylindrical “beak”. Just like the platypus, the echidna's "beak" is a very sensitive structure. Its skin contains both mechanoreceptor cells and special electroreceptors. They perceive subtle changes electromagnetic field, arising during the movement of small animals - the echidna's prey. Such electroreceptors have not yet been discovered in any other mammals, except the echidna and the platypus.

The mouth opening is located at the end of the echidna's beak. It is very tiny, but the animal’s mouth contains a long, up to 25 cm, sticky tongue, with the help of which the echidna successfully catches its prey.

These animals live, as we have already said, very secretly. So much so that, for example, the reproductive characteristics of echidnas remained unknown until very recently. Only 12 years ago, after painstaking work in the laboratory and more than ten thousand hours of observation of prickly animals in nature, scientists managed to penetrate the secrets of their family life. It turned out that during the courtship period, which lasts for echidnas all winter - from mid-May to mid-September - the animals stay in groups of up to seven individuals each, feeding and resting together. Moving from place to place, animals follow each other in single file, forming something like a caravan. At the head of the caravan there is always a female, behind her is the largest of the males, and the chain is completed by the smallest and, as a rule, the youngest animal. Outside of the mating season, echidnas lead a solitary lifestyle, and for a long time it remained a mystery how males find females during the breeding season. It turned out that chemical signals play a major role in this process - during the mating season, the animals emit a very strong musky odor.