How does a mother kangaroo tell her baby from the other kangaroo babies? You may not have thought about this before, but it can really be a problem, at least if you're a kangaroo. After all, one kangaroo looks very much like another.
Kangaroos live in groups called "mobs," which usually consist of one adult male and two or three females and their young. If a baby kangaroo gets lost in the crowd, the mother kangaroo can't call it by name because she has no voice and can only make a variety of grunts, coughs and sucking sounds. However, even if she could call her baby by name, it wouldn't help much because all kangaroo babies, male or female, have the same name. They are called joeys.
So what happens when a dangerous dingo, a native Australian dog, is approaching and a joey needs to find his mother quickly? Well, he doesn't bother. He just jumps into the nearest pouch. Even if it's the wrong one, the mother probably won't reject him unless her pouch is already full. A doe who loses her baby will readily accept another joey of approximately the same age.
The animal in this picture is a wallaby, belonging to one of the 47 smaller species of the kangaroo family. All members of the kangaroo family live in Australia and nearby islands, but they do very well in captivity, so you can also see them at the zoo.
Kangaroos are marsupials, or pouched mammals. Unlike human babies, a baby kangaroo looks nothing like his parents when he is born. He is a pink, bean-shaped creature only a few centimeters long with neither eyes nor ears, but with one objective: to make the six-inch journey--with no help from his parents--through his mother's fur to her pouch. Once there he attaches himself to a teat and eats and grows without even poking out his head until he is six months old. From eight to ten months, the joey is in and out of the pouch learning about the outside world. Soon, his mother permanently evicts him from the pouch, though he continues to feed there until he is independent at eighteen months.
Then, when the dingo comes along, it's every kangaroo for himself!
