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Thanks to Kristie for suggesting this week's topic, the phascogale!\n\nFurther reading:\n\nRed-tailed phascogales (all photos below come from this site)\n\nSleeping phascogale:\n\n\n\nWide-awake phascogales:\n\n \n\nShow transcript:\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\nAges ago, Kristie suggested I look up the phascogale, a really cute Australian animal. It\u2019s definitely adorable and a little bit weird, so let\u2019s learn about it this week!\nLike most mammals that live in Australia, the phascogale is a marsupial. That means that the babies are born very early, then finish developing in their mother\u2019s pouch. In this case, though, the phascogale mother doesn\u2019t have a real pouch. Instead, when the mother is pregnant she develops what\u2019s called a pseudo-pouch. Pseudo means false, so it\u2019s not really a pouch although it resembles one. The pseudo-pouch is made up of folds of skin that develop around the mother\u2019s teats, which protects the babies and keeps them warm. Since every baby needs its own teat at this stage, and the mother only has eight teats, if more than eight babies are born, the extra ones die.\nThe babies stay in the pseudo-pouch for about a month and a half, at which point they\u2019re big enough that the mother can\u2019t carry them around anymore. She makes a nest for them in a hollow tree, where they stay for another several months. She leaves them in the nest while she finds food, but comes back periodically to take care of them.\nThe phascogale is silvery-gray or gray-brown with a long tail that\u2019s fluffy and black toward the end. It looks sort of like a mouse or rat with a long nose and a squirrel-like tail that\u2019s almost as long as its body. It\u2019s almost as big as a squirrel, up to about 10 inches long not including its tail, or 26 cm. Despite its resemblance to a rodent, the phascogale isn\u2019t related to rodents at all. Rodents are placental mammals, not marsupial mammals.\nThe phascogale is nocturnal and mostly eats insects and spiders, but it will eat birds and mice too. It especially likes to eat cockroaches, yum. It mostly lives in trees although it will also hunt on the ground or in low brush, and it can jump long distances.\nDuring the day the phascogale sleeps in a little hollow in a tree. It actually enters torpor while it\u2019s asleep in order to save energy, which means it lowers its metabolic rate and its body temperature. But it can rev itself up again in only a few minutes when it needs to.\nThe strangest thing about the phascogale is that after mating season the males die. Mating season takes place over about three weeks in mid-winter, during which time a female may mate with several males. She\u2019s able to store sperm in her body until she\u2019s ready to have babies several months later, at which point she uses the stored sperm to fertilize her eggs. As a result, babies born in a single litter may have different fathers.\nThe males expend so much energy during these three weeks of mating season that they die of stress-related illnesses. In captivity, where the males can be treated by a veterinarian, a male who survives his first mating season can live as long as three years, but he doesn\u2019t mate again. The female usually only has one litter of babies in her life even if she lives for several years.\nThe phascogale is closely related to the antechinus, which looks similar but has a skinny tail instead of a fluffy one. Antechinus males also die after mating season, while females give birth to tiny babies who latch onto a teat in the pseudo-pouch and stay there while they continue to develop, just like phascogales. Unlike phascogales, though, which always have eight teats, female antechinuses have different numbers of teats. How many teats a female has depends on where she lives. (Just a reminder, the word teats is another word for nipples.) Populations that live in areas where there\u2019s plenty of food have more nipples, up to 13 but usually 12 at most. Populations that live in areas where it\u2019s hard to f...