With no nipples and reptilelike eggs,
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, short-beaked echidnas look like a first draft of a mammal. Yet, as Australia’s other digging mammals decline from invasive predators,
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, the well-defended echidna is getting new love as an ecosystem engineer.
The only mammals today that lay eggs are the four echidna species and the duck-billed platypus. Eggs are probably a holdover from the time before mammals split from reptiles. Each year or so,
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, the short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus) lays one leathery egg “about the size of a grape,” says Christine Cooper of Curtin University in Perth. Instead of constructing a nest, mom deposits the egg in her version of a kangaroo pouch and waddles around with it.
When the egg hatches about 10 days later,
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, two patches of pores in mom’s pouch ooze milk,
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, and the baby laps it off her skin. The puggle, as a baby echidna is called, hitchhikes for weeks as mom forages. The ride ends,
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, however, when the puggle starts growing spines. “Then mum’s like,
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, ‘Nope,
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, no more,’ and she will put [baby] into a burrow,” Cooper says.
Foraging echidnas claw around and poke their snouts into termite or ant nests, flicking out a long gooey tongue to flypaper up insects

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