HENRY'S ECHIDNA PAGE

Welcome to Henry Neeman's echidna page, a celebration of an obscure but lovable egg-laying mammal.

I'm a big fan of echidnas, sometimes called spiny anteaters. They look like a cross between a hedgehog and an anteater, and they do eat ants.

Echidnas are monotremes. Monotremes — two species of echidnas as well as platypuses — are mammals that lay eggs. (In fact, there's some controversy about whether they're mammals at all.) When threatened by predators, echidnas curl up into little balls with their spines sticking out. Wild monotremes live in and around Australia.

If you watch the Disney movie The Rescuers Down Under, there's a brief shot of an echidna in one of the early sequences. The main character, a boy named Cody, refers to him as Nelson.

Hustle up Nelson, Faloo's sounding the call!

It's not a speaking role, though.

Here's an article about long-beaked echidnas.

Best quote:
... plump, terrier-size creatures abristle with so many competing notes of crane, mole, pig, turtle, tribble, Babar and boot scrubber that if they didn't exist, nobody would think to Photoshop them.

Thanks to my sister Alisa for forwarding the link to me.

NEWS FLASH!

The Oklahoma City Zoo has echidnas!
I'll post pictures soon.

Here's a story that Don Herbison-Evans (don@socs.uts.edu.au) of Sydney told me (reprinted with his permission):

... Anna and I came across an Echidna recently trying to cross a busy road .... We stopped and pushed it with a shoe across the road (it was too prickly to pick up) which was easy as it rolled into a ball when approached. It seemed vey grateful and rapidly unrolled and shuffled off up the bank on (new) side of the road. I must admit that that is the first time I have seen one in the wild since I came to Australia in 1967. ...

And here's a story by Ellen Suter (reprinted with her permission):

I saw your echidna link while looking for dance venues. Have you ever tried to pick up an echidna? I worked at the LA Zoo about thirty years ago. At the time, they had two echidnas. The echidnas were "adopted", which means that a patron donated money to sponsor their display and in exchange, they had a little bronze plaque attached to the cage with the donor's name. The echidna's sponsor was Frank Zappa. Anyway, echidnas have something strange happening with their feet, so if you take hold of them, which looks difficult but isn't really - the spines are very thick and not prickly, and pull, nothing really happens. I have no idea why. At the time, I never got an opportunity to look at the soles of their feet, but I swear it felt like they had suction cups. I suppose they were just holding on with claws, but whatever the mechanism, it really worked!

Here's some echidna links:

Wikipedia page on echidnas
Wikipedia page on Echidna, the mother of all monsters (where the animal got its name)
Monotreme Extreme — all about echidnas, from the Pelican Lagoon Research Centre, Kangaroo Island, South Australia, home of famous echidna researcher Peggy Rismiller, who has the coolest job in the world
Echidna page — Unique Australian Animals website
Echidna page — America Zoo website
Rainforest Echidna — Chambers Wildlife Rainforest Lodges
Wildlife of Tasmania Echidna Page — Tasmanian Parks & Wildlife
Victor the Echidna — San Diego Zoo
Echidna/Spiny Anteater Printout — EnchantedLearning.com
Short-beaked Echidna — Tasmanian Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment
Welcome to Echidna! — Somebody paid money for this.
Knuckles the Echidna from the Sonic the Hedgehog videogame series

Got any great echidna stories? Know of a cool echidna page? Write me!

Maintained by Henry Neeman (hneeman@ou.edu).

URL: http://hneeman.oscer.ou.edu/echidna.html