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# One echidna, or five?
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/one-echidna-or-five/
- Published: 2026-09-19T08:47:20.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-19T08:47:20.000Z
- Description: Associate Professor Stewart Nicol has spent more than forty years with echidnas. His review of decades of research finds one species living five quite different lives, and that matters for every carer and zoo in the country.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Conservation, All stories

Anyone who has met an echidna on a bush track knows the routine: the spines go up, the nose goes down, and the whole animal becomes a patient little hummock until you move along. Across Australia that same animal lives in snow gum country, red desert, rainforest and suburban gardens, and for a long time science treated it as one creature doing one thing. Associate Professor Stewart Nicol of the University of Tasmania's School of Natural Sciences has spent more than forty years with echidnas, much of it in the Tasmanian field, and his new review in Australian Zoologist gathers research from around the country into one picture. What it shows is a single species living five quite different lives. Tasmanian echidnas enter true hibernation each autumn, body temperature falling for months at a time, while desert echidnas simply slow down for short spells. Tasmanian mothers wean their young on rich milk in as little as 130 days; on Kangaroo Island the same job can take up to 210 days on noticeably thinner milk. Even the beak has been reshaped by place. Desert animals carry a shorter beak angled upward for ants and termites, and southern animals a longer, flatter one for probing deep into pasture soil after grubs.

"Echidnas essentially colonised an entire continent and reshaped themselves to suit every corner of it," Associate Professor Nicol said. Fossils suggest they crossed from New Guinea less than a million years ago, when lower seas joined the two lands, and that helps explain a puzzle in the genetics. Five regional types, or subspecies, are recognised, yet DNA studies so far sort echidnas into only three groups: New Guinea, eastern Australia and western Australia. Body and behaviour, it seems, changed faster than the genes have had time to record. Associate Professor Nicol is calling for a proper genetic study across the whole country, and for every researcher to say plainly which population their animals came from.

That last point is where the review reaches beyond the journal. Zoos, wildlife carers and conservation managers often work from general guidelines, and those guidelines may describe only one regional form. A carer in Hobart raising an orphaned puggle and a carer in Broome are looking after animals with different milk, different timetables and different winters. "What's true for a Tasmanian echidna is not necessarily true for one in the Queensland rainforest or the Western Australian desert," Associate Professor Nicol said. Australia's most widespread native mammal, it turns out, is also one of its most varied, and knowing which echidna you have in your hands is the first step to looking after it well. There are still big gaps, and the tropical animals in particular have had far less attention than the southern ones, which sounds to us like an invitation for the next forty years of patient field work.

### Sources and links

Our short take: the research is described in a University of Tasmania release (23 June 2026), carried in full by Mirage News and Phys.org, and in the open access review in Australian Zoologist linked below. Photograph: Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0.

- [Australia's echidnas reveal a prickly scientific puzzle, University of Tasmania](https://www.utas.edu.au/about/news-and-stories/articles/2026/australias-echidnas-reveal-a-prickly-scientific-puzzle) The university's release, 23 June 2026.
- [How real are the subspecies of Tachyglossus aculeatus?](https://doi.org/10.1071/AZ26020) The review in Australian Zoologist, volume 45 issue 2, Monotreme Marvels collection, online 22 June 2026, open access.