 in younger males appear to be smaller and to grow as they approach maturity. As the glands are ever-changing, they develop in different ways. Scent glands can appear dry at times and oily at other times. Different koalas have various shaped scent glands. Some of them are long, thin, and have a central crease. Others have an oval or keyhole-shaped gland.
For creatures that look so cuddly and snuggly, you might expect that they make cute little soft, warm sounds to each other. But if you have ever heard a koala make its characteristic call, known as a bellow, then you know otherwise. A bellow is a loud snore that is followed by a belch. The sound is far from appealing and might scare anyone off! The roar is just one in the koala’s arsenal of sounds, and I mean arsenal. If you are uninitiated to the sounds that a koala makes, then hearing them might scare the daylights out of you.
To a koala, the bigger the beast, the deeper its call. Most land-dwelling creatures produce their noises by expelling air through the voice box that causes vibrations in a couple of membranous flaps. However, koalas do things differently. Their croaking call was typical of an animal with a vocal tract that is almost the entire length of an adult koala. The low-pitched mating calls produced by the velar vocal folds can help others identify the caller and figure out his body size. Another extended thought theory is that female koalas utilize the bellow pitch as an honest signal of male quality.
Maybe you like salamanders, and that’s perfectly fine. However, you probably weren’t expecting those baby koalas, when firstborn, to look like lizard-like creatures. They are born long before they can survive independently, which is why they have to spend months inside their mothers’ pouch. When first born, baby koalas, known as joeys, are only about two centimeters long and are completely bald. They are also entirely blind deaf, as none of their organs have yet fully developed. However, it does have claws, as well as strong forelimbs, which allow it to get around its mother’s pouch.
You might be shocked to learn that the tiny joey makes its way from the birth canal to the pouch without any help from its mother. The joey climbs up through the fur on the mother’s abdomen to the pouch opening. Once inside the mother’s pouch, it attaches itself to one of the two milk teats, which swells to fill its mouth. For the first few months of life, the joey stays inside the pouch and drinks only the mother’s pouch. Over these few months, they grow, develop eyes, ears, and fur. By about seven months of age, the joey can leave the pouch for longer and longer periods.
That might seem incredibly gross, but “pap” is the proper name given to a particular type of poo that mother koalas feed to joeys in a month or so before they become mature enough to eat eucalyptus leaves. Pap is smooth and runny, and it provides the microorganisms that need to populate the joey’s intestinal tract before it can digest the leaves. Koala joeys are not born with this specific bacterium, so for it to eat and digest the tough and fibrous eucalyptus leaves, it has to be passed on from the mom to the baby.
After spending about six months drinking milk, the joey will start spending short periods out of the pouch and nuzzling its nose around. This movement is what stimulates the production of pap. Before leaving the mother’s pouch and devouring an adult diet, they stay in the pap for a few weeks, perhaps a month. They must establish enough bacteria. Imagine your mother feeding you poop. Whether it was full of probiotics or not, the authorities would probably take you away from her permanently. However, koalas don’t call feeding poop to their kids child abuse. They call it love.
19. Mother Koalas Kick Their Young Out Of their Home Range
After about six months of age, joeys leave the mother’s pouch and ride around on her back, though they return to the bag to drink the mother’s milk. They continue doing so until they are too large to fit inside it. Joeys remain with their mothers for one to three years, 