He has good maternal help, but he still has a lot of work to get to the marsupium, name of the famous pouch that the mother-kangaroo has in her womb. When about to give birth, the female lies on her back on the ground, with the pubic area slightly higher than the rest of her body.
As soon as it is born, the calf takes advantage of the inclination of the mother’s body to slide towards the entrance of the pouch. Then he crawls into it until he’s comfortable. The whole process takes about ten minutes – an eternity for the baby kangaroo, which looks like a little worm at 2 centimeters in length. “At birth, it is still in an embryonic stage. His eyes are closed, he doesn’t have any fur, and his hind legs haven’t even developed. The calf drags itself only with the help of its front legs and you have to be very careful, because if it falls to the ground, its mother won’t rescue it and it will die», says zoologist Mario de Vivo, a specialist in mammals at the Museum of Zoology of the USP. Once inside the pouch, the newborn looks for the mother’s nipple to start feeding. When bitten, the nipple dilates and the puppy is trapped in it as if it were hitched. Attached to its mother, and always well fed, it completes its development in about 200 days.
This type of gestation was once considered a primitive process in the evolutionary scale of animals. Today, however, specialists see advantages for kangaroos in it. “It’s just a different reproductive strategy. The female is less compromised and, in a situation of food scarcity, for example, she can get rid of the calf and have a new calf at a more favorable moment”, says Mario.