#potoroos

I would like to interrupt my usual writing content to tell you about potoroos.

The potoroo is the most endangered mammal in Australia. It looks a lot like a large rat, but it is actually a marsupial, and a macropod marsuapial at that, just like a kangaroo! They are so rare that even many people in Australia have never heard of them. They date back to the Ice Age and scientists consider them to be "living fossils" but they were nearly wiped out when European colonizers arrived in Australia. . .bringing with them cats and foxes that hunted the potoroos into nigh-obliteration. They were thought extinct until a researcher found one alive in a wallaby trap.

Since then, there's been conservation efforts to help shelter and breed them, but it's slow-going since there's so little awareness of them, and they're not big glamorous animals like tigers, pandas, or whales, so it's hard to get people invested. But they're super important for the environment; they're "ecosystem engineers"!

See, they eat truffles and other fungus, and when they dig for these, they turn over the soil, which spreads around the minerals in the soil, which nurture nearby plants that provide food and shelter for other animals. Their digging also turns over the leaf litter, which helps prevent forest fires. And what does Australia have a big problem with these days? Forest fires.

La Vie des Animaux Illustrée. Written by Alfred Brehm. Illustration by Theodor Franz Zimmermann. 1869 French edition.

{ Credit to Queenkoop96 for Pinstripe Expression }