Echidnas: Tachyglossidae - Physical Characteristics, Diet, Behavior And Reproduction, Echidnas And People, Short-beaked Echidna (tachyglossus Aculeatus): Species Account - GEOGRAPHIC RANGE, HABITAT, CONSERVATION STATUS
guinea lives australia highlands
The short-beaked echidna lives throughout Australia, Tasmania, and the lowlands of New Guinea. The long-beaked echidna lives only in the New Guinea highlands.
The short-beaked echidna lives wherever its main food sources, ants and termites, are abundant enough to keep it fed, allowing the species to occupy nearly all habitat types in Australia and New Guinea, from tropical rainforest and grassland to desert. The long-beaked echidna is confined to alpine meadows up to 12,000 feet (3,660 meters) above sea level, and to humid mountain forests in the New Guinea highlands.
The short-beaked echidna is still plentiful in Australia, and has no special conservation status listing at present. The long-beaked echidna of New Guinea, on the other hand, is faring poorly. Its forest habitat is being cleared for logging, mining, and agriculture, and people hunt the echidna for food with packs of trained dogs. Because of these threats, the long-beaked echidna is listed as Endangered.
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Echidnas (ih-KID-nahz), also called spiny anteaters, are solidly built, short-legged, shuffling mammals that can grow fairly large, up to 14 pounds (6.5 kilograms) for the short-beaked (or short-nosed) echidna and up to 20 pounds (9 kilograms) for the long-beaked (or long-nosed). Head and body length in an adult short-beaked echidna can reach 21 inches (53 centimeters), the stubby tail adding anot…
Echidnas are not as well known as the platypus, but they fascinate naturalists and zoologists for the same reasons: they lay eggs, have a combination of reptilian and mammalian characteristics, and remind us of a time when reptiles were evolving into mammals. …
Physical characteristics: The short-beaked echidna is a compact, heavily muscled, short-legged creature covered with fur and an array of sharp spines. From a distance, it looks and moves something like a porcupine. Up close, it looks less like a porcupine and more like a waddling shrub of grass-like leaves and sharp thorns with a long, probing twig (the snout) at the forward end. Adult short-beake…
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