There are thousands of cute and interesting animals in the world, but their is always similar, either a lump or a root. Among them, there is a kind of animal that is very different, which is a pure natural square.
Let's take you to appreciate the first.
The chocolate in my hand suddenly stopped smelling...
Image courtesy of Reddit
This animal living in Australia is popular before, but it may still be a little worse than the koala. However, last year's raging Australian wildfires completely made this "animal hero" popular.
Speaking of which, it is estimated that many people have guessed that the protagonist of today's article is the wombat.
wombat
Image credit: pinterest
Where do wombats live?
Isolated in the southern hemisphere, Australia is a land that is still dominated by marsupials.
People have found ferocious predators in Eurasia, and can also find similar thylacines in Australia; gliding forest shrews, in Australia have "stand-in" possums, we are familiar with badgers, ferrets, rats, minks and other animals, many of which have marsupial "stand-ins" from Australia.
There are marsupial adaptation radiation indications
Image courtesy of Biology Discussion
Wombats, as "stand-ins" for bears from Eurasia and the Americas, are also large and slender, and live in caves.
Unlike bears, which sometimes hold "honeypots" and sometimes fiercely bleed, they are downright plant predators.
Wombats are also marsupials, but their pouches are very different and open backwards. Image courtesy of Flickr
Taxonomically explained, wombats are a general term for three extant species in the bicienthord family Wombatidae.
The three species of wombats belong to two genera, namely the wombat genus Lasiorhinus and the wombat genus Vombatus, of which the genus Triceratops has the northern wombat L. Krefftii and Southern Fury Snout Wombat L. There are two species of latifrons, while the genus Wombats has only Wombat V. Ursinus is a species.
The distribution area of the three species of wombats
Image courtesy of Queensland Government
The name of the genus Wombat is Vombatus, which is derived from the Australian Aboriginal name for the wombat "wombach", and the English name of the wombat "wombat" is also derived from this.
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Northern Furstreak Wombat (L. krefftii）
Image credit: Australian Geographic
Southern Fury Wombat (L. latifrons）
Wombat (V. ursinus）
Image courtesy of wikipedia
Today's protagonist, the wombat (common wombat), Vombatus ursinus, is widely but discontinuously distributed along the coasts of eastern and southern Australia and the island of Tasmania.
Wombats are not uncommon in their range, and they do not forage away from their burrows or give up their burrows easily. As a result, many wildlife enthusiasts are able to squat and photograph wombats by pinpointing the location of their caves.
Wild wombats don't have much fear of humans, so many animal lovers can get close enough to them and even take clear photos directly with their mobile phones.
However, wild animals are still not touched as a good idea, just look at it
I didn't invite you, but you can come
Friends who have watched the news before should know that the wombats' homes are quite powerful - because they have extremely strong digging ability, able to dig complex and functional cave systems.
The news said that during the fire, the wombats took the initiative to invite other animals to take refuge in the passage they dug. Image courtesy of twitter
Wombats are typical burrowing animals.
In fact, they do not take the initiative to invite other animals to their homes, nor do they organize other animals to take refuge in the tunnels and caves they have dug. However, if some of the same kind of people with overlapping homes want to go into the cave to rest, they will allow and will not exclude other "outsiders" from staying.
The caves dug by wombats can be roughly divided into three categories according to their size.
The smallest of these caves are generally dug in habitats that are not suitable for its survival; medium caves are 2-5 meters long and are often used as temporary shelters; and the caves used mainly daily can reach up to 20 meters for wombats to rest during the day.
Wombats in caves
Wombats feed on herbaceous plants, and in addition to Australia's native plants, they do not reject a small number of introduced plants.
Their range is not large, and their foraging behavior is mostly carried out near caves.
Let's show everyone a wombat chewing grass
Wombats have weak eyesight and are often active at night, so they are often threatened by "road killing", in order to prevent wombats from being killed by night driving, the Australian government has extensively set up notices near the wombats' habitats to remind owners that there are wild wombats nearby.
Even so, road killings occur from time to time. At present, there is no effective way to curb this accident that seriously endangers the survival of wild animals around the world.
"Wombats are haunted, please slow down!"
Where does block come from?
Having said so half a day of knowledge, let's talk about the focus of this article - the square mentioned at the beginning of the article.
The following content is slightly heavy taste, friends who feel uncomfortable with animal excrement, please pinch your thighs and try to read it before leaving.
Wombats are so cute, how can you not read the article!
In nature, square things are very few, and I don't think you can count them with your fingers. And the little cute of the wombat belongs to one of the natural squares.
Although this interesting fact has long been known to the scientific community, the reason why wombats can pull out square poop is not understood until recent years.
Because wombats have a habit of marking territory with urine and feces, scientists have speculated about the significance of the existence of square feces, possibly to prevent the feces used to mark territory from rolling around. This idea was later overturned — wombats didn't need to fix their feces at the mouth of the cave to claim sovereignty.
The other way of thinking is more well grounded.
Wild wombats have angular cubes, while the wombats raised in zoos pull poop that is not particularly iconic.
Poop for wombats living in zoos
Compared with wombats in zoos and wombats in the wild, people found that the biggest difference between them is the intake of water in food and drinking water. Wild wombats inhabit the dry and rainy grasslands and woodlands of eastern and southern Australia, and under the action of harsh environments, it is difficult for them to obtain a large amount of water from the daily diet, and their physiological characteristics have also been driven by natural conditions, and fecal shaping is one of them.
The wombats living under artificial conditions do not worry about eating and drinking, and have a clean water supply and fresh grass to enjoy every day, so the feces are no longer cubes.
Cute and want rua!
In 2018, a team from Patricia Yang at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States conducted a study to explore the causes of wombat square feces.
By comparing the intestines extracted from the two wombats that were killed in Australia with the intestines of pigs, it was found that the intestinal shape of the wombats was more irregular than that of pigs, and there were two grooves (ravine-like grooves), and Yang deduced that these characteristics and water intake together determine the strange shape of the wombat's feces.
Of course, she also said that the research still needs to be explored in the future, such as why the wombat's intestines only have two grooves instead of four grooves involved in the shaping of feces.
Written by | Qiao Zichen Jiang Ke
Some of the images are from | 123rf.com.cn
WeChat Editor | glad