Go Wild Ja: Red Kangaroo

Are you ready to go wild? I'm Kelsey and I'm here at the beautiful home zoo in Kingston, which is home to several species of animals, some of them exotic and some of them native to Jamaica. Over the next few weeks we'll be taking you on a wild adventure to discover the animals right here at the zoo. Let's go wild! Today I'm here with Zoo Curator Joey Brown, who's going to be talking to me about the red kangaroo, which is the largest of the kangaroo family and comes from Australia. All right, what category of animal kingdom do they fall under? So kangaroos are macropods, or marsupials. So they're the largest marsupials around, which means the young live in the pouch. So here we have two females. We have our older female, Zara, who's about four years old, and a younger female, Rue, who's about two years old. All right, what's their lifespan like? So typically it's about 22-25 years in the wild. In captivity they can live a bit longer, so they can easily live about 30 years in captivity. I know people typically think kangaroos are aggressive, so are they aggressive or are they friendly? They're actually fairly friendly. The males can definitely get a bit territorial or aggressive during breeding season, but that's normally just with other males. So that's when they're trying to compete and breed with certain females. So you will see male kangaroos fighting with each other. But with people, they're very skittish. They want nothing to do with people, so they just pop away if they don't want anything to do with people. Ours here are very friendly, but they're just kind of shy, so they kind of just stick to themselves. So if I see a kangaroo typically in the wild, is it wise for me to approach? I mean, you could just keep your distance, but they're not going to usually come after you, unless, you know, I'd be more protective. If they had a baby joey with them, the female might be a bit more protective. But typically they're just going to run away. Yeah, there's nothing to worry about. How much does it cost to maintain? It's hard to say exactly, but definitely several thousand dollars U.S. a month, because they have a specific diet kind of food that they must eat. So they graze on grass, but we have a special pelt formula that we import from the U.S. So we have to import that food monthly, and that's, you know, a quite expensive expenditure. What is something interesting about a kangaroo? Let's see. I think one of the most interesting things about kangaroos is like the reproductive cycle. And so a couple of things. So the females can literally be kind of caring for or producing almost three generations at once. So when they give, when the baby kangaroo is born, it comes out about the size of a tiny lima bean. It weighs less than one gram. This is born after 33 days of gestation. And so it's born out, and then it climbs up the mom's fur and into the pouch. And at that point it can't survive on its own. So it gets into the pouch and immediately attaches to the teeth to start, you know, breastfeeding. And then over the next, you know, six, seven months, it actually develops into a fully developed embryo baby kangaroo or a joey. But it stays in the pouch for the first eight months of its life, kind of growing. And at the same time, the mom is caring for an older joey that is living outside the pouch that was probably somewhere around a year old that is still breastfeeding from the mom too. So the mom is kind of nursing an older baby that is about a year old and also nursing for a younger baby. It's a different generation inside the pouch. And so, and then at about eight months, that baby will come out of the pouch and start living outside the pouch, but still nursing from mom. And then the other cool thing is they can have a fertilized embryo in the body. So almost, you know, a baby that's ready to start developing, but they can do this really neat adaptation called embryonic diapause. How long can they pause it? I'm not sure if there's, they know the exact amount of time, but it can easily be several months. So, you know, they may wait if they get pregnant and like in a dry season, it's not the most favorable conditions. They'll pause that pregnancy. And then, you know, when the more rains come around, there's more food, then they can, the pregnancy will continue and that baby will start to develop. So it's a really neat adaptation because they, you know, they're from Australia, which is a really harsh environment. You know, it's very dry, desert like environment. So it's another neat adaptation for them to survive and thrive. What are the shipping protocols in terms of getting exotic animals to the zoo? So the shipping protocols for animals into Jamaica is extremely strict. And for good reasons, you know, we need to be very careful of what kind of animals are allowed to be brought onto the island. Before any animal even starts the kind of import process or starts, you know, flying here, it has to pass numerous, almost like say six months to a year of various testing, blood tests, vaccinations, medications to make sure they're totally, you know, kind of clean and healthy and ready to come to Jamaica. And all this has to go through special permitting through the government agencies here in Jamaica. And so it's a very kind of tightly structured protocol just to make sure, you know, unhealthy, sick animals aren't brought in and kind of, it's for the protection of our own wildlife here in Jamaica as well. Well, that's it for this week's wild adventure. Join us again next week to learn about the animals here at the zoo. Until then, I'm Kelsey. Bye.