What makes a mother Kangaroo’s pouch warm and protective?

 

It is indeed captivating to watch the mother kangaroo going around with her offspring, called joey, in the pouch. Even though there are other marsupials whose young ones are raised in pouches, like Tasmanian devils, koalas and opossums, the kangaroos as the ones who have caught the imagination of the humans, states a report in livescience.com.

Describing rather aptly, Rick Schwartz, who is the national spokesperson at the San Diego Zoo and an animal care supervisor, called the pouch of the kangaroo a sweatshirt hoodie put on backwards. While the sweatshirt hood is the pouch, the muscles of the mother kangaroo are like the drawstrings which she uses to open and close the pouch. He told Live Science: "It does open up quite a bit if she wants it to.”

The interior of the pouch is like that of a kangaroo's skin texture but without any hair while being soft. Schwartz said it can be compared with the skin on the inside of a human being’s wrist. To protect the joey, the pouch remains warm with the temperature being equal to that of the mother. This is 105 degrees Fahrenheit or 40.5 degrees Celsius, making it quite sweaty.

There are four milk ducts or teats inside the pouch. Following the birth of the joey through the mother kangaroo’s vaginal canal after a gestation of 32 to 33 days, the offspring is very impoverished and weighs less than a gram, and is about the size of a jellybean. Tenaciously using its forelimbs, the joey moves to the pouch. It is here that the little one fastens itself to a teat which is elongated, which swells and goes down its throat. This is where said Schwartz, the baby will hold on for about three-and-a-half to four months.

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