Most people know that kangaroos have a pouch. But for several decades it has been known that kangaroos climb independently into their mother’s pouch only after birth. But how do kangaroos give birth?
Kangaroos and wallabies don’t reproduce the way most of their fellow mammals do — they keep their short and to the point, with young crawling out of the womb and up to their mother’s pouch after just a month’s gestation. Once there, the tiny joeys spend about nine months nursing and growing before they’re ready to actually climb out of the pouch into the world.
This Mom Is Still Pregnant. But She’s Already Having Another Baby.
What you might not have heard is that the joey in the pouch is not the only offspring in its mother’s body. Almost all kangaroos and wallabies have two separate uteruses, and they usually contrive to have extra, undeveloped embryos waiting in the wings — or rather, in whichever uterus was unused in their most recent pregnancy. Often they get pregnant again within days of birth, and their bodies keep the new embryo from developing for months at a time, until its older sibling has reached sufficient maturity.|
But researchers report in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday that the swamp wallaby, a small, dark-furred creature, has an even more peculiar way of doing things. It gets pregnant again before the first pregnancy is even over, suggesting that female swamp wallabies may be pregnant continuously for their entire reproductive lives.
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Video resource: National Geographic
