Native Australian animals

Native Australian animals news!

Native Australian animals are really unique over a very wide range of biodiversity
and this is largely due to the relative isolation of Australia, the world's
largest island - or smallest continent? It is 3,000 km across this sunburned
country! It was once probably joined to New Guinea and Asia, but that was millions
of years ago. So the native animals are rather unusual.

Best known of course is the Australian red kangaroo, a marsupial which carries its
young in a pouch, as an oppossum does. There are many varieties of kangaroos and the
smaller, related wallabies, quokka and others, are often found on offshore islands. The small
koala bear which feeds on Australian red, yellow and white gum leaves up in the eucalyptis
trees is yet another native animal that has become an Aussie icon for travellers, sports teams
and tourist souvenir hunters, when visiting the land 'downunder.' Koala Blue is the trade name
that was adopted by the Australian singer, Olivia Newton-John. The country's official rugby union
team is known as The Wallabies. An AFL Team is called The Kangaroos. Animals are certainly iconic.

In tropical Queensland, crocodiles are very abundant. There are salt water crocodiles or 'salties',
the dangerous ones, and fresh water crocodiles, the less dangerous of the two species. The hunting lobby
wants to make shooting crocs legal again, and some want to attract tourists by running crocodile hunting
tours. The numbers of crocs in the north are currently excessive due to legal protection and some form
of culling might have to occur. A famous crocodile hunter is Mick Dundee, from the movie 'Crocodile Dundee'
and more recently Steve Irwin has become infamous worldwide for his carrying a helpless baby with him
into the croc enclosure.

The island state of Tasmania in the south, named after the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman who discovered it
around the year 1642 - is known for some very strange native animals. The extinct Tasmanian tiger had
stripes across its back. The Tasmanian devil lives on but in very reduced numbers. It is a fierce, noisy
hissing meat eater that will finish off dead oppossums and carrion on the road. Never try to take one home
or even to touch one. They are extremely aggressive creatures and scary to boot. They have a nocturnal habit,
like the oppossum and wild cats.

Australia has thousands of species of reptiles. There are snakes galore although you almost never see one.
Some snakes are extremely venomous, such as the Western Australian brown snake, dugite and tiger snake. Others are completely harmless to you but don't take any risks! There are large lizards throughout the Australian
states, such as the blue-tongued lizard and others that the aborigines eat daily.

An unusual Australian native animal that looks like a hybrid is the duck-billed platypus, a kind of flat footed
amphibious duck-mole of land and water that you see lying in small streams, feeding through its duck beak. It looks rather like a cross between a duck and a beaver. A strange hybrid of evolution, indeed. Such are the animals of the land downunder!

There are poisonous spiders too, the red back spider and the funnel web spider. The red back can cause paralysis and the funnel web spider can kill you. It is based around Sydney, NSW, where the most famous Australian zoo is: The Taronga Park Zoo on the edge of Sydney Harbour. Finally, a word about toads. The cane toad found in Queensland sugar cane fields and right across the northern territory to Western Australia, is poisonous to other species and tends to completely wipe out the indigenous species of creatures. It is not a native toad of Australia and I believe it originally came from South or Central America and it is suited to a tropical climate. These toads are a real pest and are endangering hundreds of native Australian animals.