In beautiful Australia, a country that hosts an unimaginable variety of animals, we find a marsupial that is not a kangaroo, it is not large enough to be considered one, but it looks a lot like us and is worth telling about. It is called a wallaby and belongs to the Macropodidae family , there are species and we will focus on the rock wallaby, a truly extraordinary animal and not so easy to meet, even by going to find it in its homeland.
Australian Wallabies
This category of animals is actually native to central and southern Oceania and, as mentioned earlier, is not characterized by enormous dimensions, on the contrary. The maximum length reached is a little more than a meter, while the weight can vary from one kilogram to 42. Even the name “wallaby”, deriving from the Aboriginal language Dharuk, Kuringgai lineage, according to many should indicate the modest dimensions of this animal, compared to those of the kangaroo.
Wallabies eat mostly fibers and are mostly herbivorous although some species are omnivorous. The body structure is not entirely harmonious, you can see that the upper half of the body is less developed than the lower part. They have four legs but they hop on the two hind legs, the most robust and equipped with four toes, two with nails and two inserted in a common sheath. The front ones are smaller and instead have five toes all equipped with nails. The thing cannot be missing, rather thick and long, which plays an essential role in maintaining balance despite the head being really small, with very large mobile ears.
Rock Wallaby: Characteristics
This genus of wallabies is called Petrogale Gray but very often the specimens of the 16 species that are part of it are called rock wallabies. They are medium-sized animals, which can measure about 60 centimeters, plus the tail that can reach 7′ centimeters, if male, a little less if female. They have a rather colorful coat, they are animals that live mainly at night and frequent areas where there are many rocks or rugged and steep terrain where they can take refuge during the day. During the night they come out of their hiding places, whether caves or dens dug between the rocks, and wander around the surrounding areas in search of food, especially at dawn and dusk.
Rock Wallabies: Where They Live
Rock wallabies gather in small colonies, usually consisting of a few dozen individuals, and occupy a certain portion of territory where they have identified the possibility of finding suitable shelters, which is essential for their lifestyle. Since it is not always easy to find suitable land, it happens that some groups share the same hectares, even though they are highly territorial animals.
There are three types of habitats in which the rock wallaby can live and find food. It can settle in areas with groups of large scattered boulders that form a sort of labyrinth of crevices and tunnels, with underground corridors and clearings; it can instead choose cliffs where there are several medium-level ledges and caves, or even isolated rock masses, with sheer slopes and often surrounded by falling boulders.
There is not much choice, from this point of view, and when a colony of rock wallabies settles in a place it stays there, without mixing much with other groups, which is why the various colonies, even if not far from each other, have differentiated genetically from each other.
Rock Wallaby: Risks
Unfortunately, these animals are very tied to their habitat , which must have certain characteristics, and as the areas suitable for hosting them have been significantly reduced, the risk of survival for our rock wallabies has emerged. This is not a recent phenomenon, since the arrival of the first European colonizers the situation has started to worsen, but the decline has certainly accelerated and many colonies have continuously disappeared. Another threat is constituted by other animals with which wallabies share the land , foxes, for example, but also goats, sheep and rabbits that can steal their food. And then there are also diseases, such as toxoplasmosis and hydatidosis, and a physiological lowering of genetic variability due to the isolation of the colonies.
Fortunately, we have not stood by and watched and have tried to limit the disappearance of this animal from Oceania. The most important and still urgent actions are those aimed at habitat conservation and management of harmful species, such as foxes and goats. Numerous programs have been launched at a national level, thanks to the support of the Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife, to raise awareness but also to protect the lands where wallabies live, and then there are the monitoring initiatives of the many colonies, to evaluate their population, both in numbers and in genetic heritage.