Australia has had large-scale and long-running forest fires for several years in a row, sometimes lasting as long as a few months, engulfing the lives of nearly half a billion animals and causing countless economic losses.
Australian animals are unique, not only huge, but also rapidly multiplying. These include a large number of marsupials and highly venomous animals such as koalas, platypus, and taipan snakes, which are endemic to the forest fires.
Some animals are very lucky, accidentally found the "fire hole" during escape, and escaped in the hole, these animals should thank the owner of the fire cave, Australia's "soil fat round": wombat.
Wombats are definitely Australia's ineffectual hermits, they do not like to compete with other animals for territory, and live a peaceful life of day and night.
There are many peculiarities about wombats, such as the fact that its feces are the standard cube structure; the wombat's brood bag is opened backwards, which also causes the mother wombat to excrete, and it is possible to pull the feces right on the baby's head.
Wombats are members of The Australian Marsupial Mammals, divided into 2 genera and 3 species, from the picture, the wombats are petite and cute, in fact, it is a physically strong "big guy", adult wombats are more than one meter long and weigh up to 60 to 70 pounds.
Female wombats are slightly larger than males, have a stronger body, have more muscle mass, and look very cute.
Wombats have powerful four claws, long and very hard foretoe nails, are good at digging holes and nesting, and have flat and broad skulls, allowing them to push dirt and stones out of the burrow with their heads when digging holes quickly.
Female wombats and male wombats only live together during the breeding season, and once the female wombats are pregnant, they will drive the male wombats away and interpret the donkey unloading to the fullest. Female wombats give birth to cubs after 7 1/2 months of gestation, each with only one wombat.
Wombats are generally born in mid-October, and the wombats live in a nursery bag for a year and a half, during which time they can only survive on breast milk. After weaning, the wombat will not leave its mother, and will follow her mother to learn foraging skills.
After 18 months, the wombats began to try to live independently, and began to reluctantly leave their mothers, dig holes and build holes, and reproduce.
Wombats have a very heavy family concept, wombat mother can not rest assured that the first time to leave the home of the wombats, but also follow the care for a period of time, help the wombats to choose a site to dig a cave, and the new cave will often be closer to the wombat mother's cave, there is plenty of food nearby.
The mother wombat will help the wombat dig a hole and lay grass until the new home of the koala is arranged, and then she will reluctantly leave.
Wombats are veritable experts in underground digging, their front paws are wide and flat, like sapper shovels, and their limbs are thick and powerful, and they are easy to dig holes. In a week's time, wombats can dig a cave more than 90 meters deep.
The metabolism of wombats is very slow, and each meal often takes more than 10 days to digest, which is comparable to koalas and sloths. Wombats are vegan animals, they don't have the fangs and claws of carnivores, but they also fight back against predators.
Because wombats have strong defensive weapons: butts, wombats have cartilage under their butts, the texture is relatively hard, and tapping with their hands is like knocking a steel helmet. Even predators such as wild dogs cannot bite through the butts of wombats.
Wombats are very good at using this weapon, sometimes running to predators, provoking enemies with their butts, and then quickly burrowing into the hole at a speed of 40 kilometers per hour, sealing the hole with their butt.
Wombats allow predators to hold their butts and bite them, but most predators are unable to inflict actual damage on the wombats and can only return in vain.
The size of the wombat is very large, so the cave entrance is also very large, and it will leave dozens of escape holes for itself, which is convenient for its own escape. Too many openings can also cause predators to drill into the cave, and wombats will play hide-and-seek in the cave with the predators.
But if they meet a predator in a cave, the wombat will lure the enemy deeper, sinking his butt down, leaving space above the tunnel and between his butt.
When the enemy sticks its head into the gap, it will use its butt to hit the top of the cave, squeezing the predator to death in the hole. Sometimes, it will also crash the cave down, and the prisoners will be buried in the cave to buy time for themselves to escape.
Contrary to their "large" size, wombats have very little guts, and if there is a noise at the mouth of the cave, the wombats will immediately become alert and scare away the other party by roaring.
Unlike other wildly bred animals in Australia, wombat populations are already in jeopardy. Their diet is relatively simple, and their metabolism is slow, resulting in more laziness and smaller range of motion.
In addition, their reproductive ability is relatively weak, each litter only produces one, and the single pregnancy time is relatively long; for hundreds of years, Australian volcanoes have often erupted, affecting the living environment of wombats; humans have also hunted wombats unscrupulously.
Eventually, humans have encroached too much on the wombats' living territory, causing serious damage to their habitat, and more and more domestic animals have begun to compete with wombats for food, which has led to fewer and fewer wombats.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Australian fur-nosed wombat in southern Queensland was completely extinct, and the situation of wombats in other regions was not optimistic.
It is not an exaggeration to say that if humans do not actively intervene to protect wombats now, they are likely to become completely extinct in the near future.
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