Nothing to see here. Just Gidgee, a juvenile rednecked wallaby, staring balefully at the intruding camera while holding onto a nipple she doesn’t want to lose track of. 🤣🦘🤣 While that thought may have you thinking “ouch!”, marsupial nipples are highly specialized and are meant to extend that far when the joey is close to permanently leaving the pouch! When a joey is born and manages to crawl into the pouch, the nipples it finds there are also super tiny - once it latches on to one, the nipple actually grows so that it fills the joey’s mouth and they can’t disengage. This works really well since marsupial babies are born very premature and do most of their development in the pouch, so they need to be kept latched on to a food source until they’re functional enough to find the nipple again on their own. As the joey grows, the nipple changes size in parallel - and the concentration of the nutrients in the milk adjusts too - always staying large enough to fit in their mouth. Joeys continue to nurse during the period when they’re exploring outside of the pouch, and often after they’ve grown big enough they’ve had to pretty much leave it for good: and so the nipples adapt, to be long and flexible, so they can be easily accessed by a joey from the outside. After a joey weans, that teat will shrink back to being tiny, and wait for a new tiny bean baby to be born and start the process all over again! #sorrytointerrupt #marsupial #wallaby #redneckedwallaby #zoo #zooanimals #zooborns #nursing (at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo) https://www.instagram.com/p/B5Yd1YPhgPe/?igshid=1r0zmub7hx5md
