Wombats: koalas' first cousins?
Reporter: Peter Young
Tuesday, 13 July 2004
Here’s trivia question for you: what animal
is the closest relation to the koala?
The answer is, the wombat. I suspect that
answer should have been upside down at the bottom of the page, but I have
great faith in your honesty.
You won’t find wombats roaming around the Gold Coast Hinterland, but they
can be found in the border ranges and they are so typically Australian that
it’s worth having a bit of a look at them.
There are three sorts of wombats in Australia. The Northern Hairy-nosed
Wombat lives in Queensland and is very rare with a remnant population of
about 113, most of which are males. As you can imagine, this is not a
particularly healthy state of affairs for a species.
The Southern Hairy-nosed Wombat is the faunal emblem of South Australia
(more trivia) while the Common Wombat is found largely in Victoria, New
South Wales and Tasmania with a modest sampling in Queensland and South
Australia.
Wombats are short, solid, powerful animals with an enormous capacity for
digging. There are wonderful stories of people who have raised them having
to leave all their doors open in order to preserve them from the wombat who
wants to come in or go out NOW! They can run a bit too, with speeds of up to
30kmh recorded. (Just for the record, a person who runs 100metre in
10seconds is travelling at an average speed of 36kmh)
In their natural state wombats excavate large burrows where they will
generally spend the day, coming out in the evening to feed. As for most
Australian nocturnal animals this behaviour is an advantage because it means
they are not out in the heat of the day. Come winter though, wombats are not
averse to a little basking in the sun.
Like their koala cousins, wombats have a hardened layer over the muscles of
their rump; a very hardened layer. When they are in their burrows, they
present this plate to would be predators who get nowhere, while sometimes
they actually squeeze the predator’s head into the roof of the burrow, which
is painful and potentially fatal.
So there are no wild wombats on the Gold Coast; our loss many people would
say.
