Wha?

Have you guys thought recently about how weird kangaroos are? We all know they carry their joeys in a skin pouch, but I couldn't really remember anything else from the 4th grade lessons plans. Nothing like writing page 16 of a paper at 8:39 PM to send you off typing "kangaroo life cycle" into Google.

It all happened as I read through my last page and realized I'd written "joey" instead of "lost". The quote reads, "...as though he were the man lying warm in bed listening and the joey creature down below howling his woes against the elements." I've been looking at my keyboard trying to figure out how I did that and all I can think is that my center was moved a little to the left for that brief moment. So because I'm crazy I thought of kangaroos and because my brain is on a delving paper-writing overdrive and I love procrastinating I became wildly, insanely! curious to learn about joeys and this is what I found.

Kangaroos sometimes have three joeys at different stages of development--one developing inside their body, one chillaxin inside their pouch and one hopping around outside but still sticking its face in the mother's pouch for some milk from time to time like this dude.

In severe conditions, the mother may not have enough energy to feed the older young, so it's left to its own devices. If conditions deteriorate, the mother will remove the pouch young (AH!). This means that the embryo in the body develops and soon occupies the vacant pouch.

Kangaroos are marsupials, which doesn't just mean "carries a baby in a pouch," but that they give birth to undeveloped young. Wallabies, wallaroos, wombats, possums and koala bears are all marsupials.

Now, when the joey enters the pouch it's is a weird looking pink thing,

only 2 cm long and less that one gram. It actually knows (not nothing at all because it has no brain, as you would assume from the picture) that it will be warm and fed if it crawls up the mother's body to her pouch. AMAZING FACT!: Uniquely, the kangaroo embryo has the ability to stop and restart its development, almost entering a state of dormancy. Scientists are studying what "turns these signals in the embryo off and on from the point of view of manipulating embryos during in vitro fertilization and for contraception." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3604045.stm)

Over the weeks, the joey starts looking more like a kangaroo


and eventually gets the hair and and the cute, as we can see here.

It becomes more active and gradually spends most of its time outside the pouch, still popping in if it's tired or scared.

The joey then leaves the pouch completely between 7 and 10 months of age. My guess is this guy's 10 months and a day.


As Sean would say, "Wouldn't you agree that kangaroos are both interesting and amazing?"

We would, Sean, we would.


That is totally an A paper. For a 9-year-old assigned to write on kangaroos instead of a 24-year-old supposed to be writing on gender in Irish writing. Back to work.