weird and unique

The short-billed echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus) is found throughout Australia in places where the temperature exceeds a threshold level. Even though Echidna cannot survive in hot temperatures of more than 35 degrees Celsius.

Echidna hedgehogs, which are known as warm-blooded animals, or endothermic, have several ways to stay cool when the air around them is hotter than their body temperature. One option is to come out only at night and sleep in burrows or on hollow logs during the hot day.

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The second option is evaporation. Most mammals do this by sweating. Some mammals, such as the kangaroo, lick their arms or legs to evaporate excess body heat.

But Echidna didn’t sweat or lick herself. The third option is to pant to keep calm (as dogs do), but porcupines don’t do that either. Until it was finally revealed that Echidna’s hedgehog always had discharge from its nose.

The first clue was noticed when Cooper’s doctoral student was studying Echidna metabolism in the laboratory. They measured the Echiidna’s respiration rate and water loss at various temperatures and humidity levels.

“We noticed that the Echidna would bubble from its nose when we exposed it to higher temperatures. We hypothesized that maybe this is a cooling mechanism,” Christine Cooper, researcher at the School of Molecular and Life Sciences at Curtin University in Australia told Live Science, Wednesday (18/1/2023).

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That initial discovery led Cooper to conduct research in the field, about 100 miles (170 kilometers) southeast of Perth, an ideal place to observe echidnas in the wild. Cooper carries a high-resolution thermal camera capable of measuring various temperatures of the Echidna’s body and that of the surrounding air.

Cooper discovered that whenever the ambient temperature exceeded the Echidna’s body temperature, its beak would remain cold. In fact, the beak keeps the Echidna cool, due to its runny or runny nose. “The main reason they keep the nose moist is electroreception,” explains Cooper.

Echidnas feed on ants and termites, which they find underground by detecting the electrical impulses released by the muscle contractions of their prey. For their nasal electroreceptors to work, they need to be moist. “We think they increase it when it’s hot, so another role is thermoregulation,” Cooper explained.

(wib)