Echidnas blow snot bubbles to cool themselves off, a trick that allows them to survive in temperatures that should kill them.
— egg-laying mammals unique to Australia and New Guinea . Previous lab studies showed that temperatures above 35° Celsius should kill echidnas. But echidnas don’t seem to have gotten the memo. They live everywhere from tropical rainforests to deserts to snow-capped peaks, leaving scientists with a physiological puzzle.
So, armed with a heat-vision camera and a telephoto lens, Cooper and environmental physiologist Philip Withers of the University of Western Australia in Perth drove through nature reserves in Western Australia once a month for a year to film echidnas. An echidna looks like a hot spiky ball of yellow, orange and white in this heat-vision video — except for its chilly nose, which shows up as a purple and black blob. That’s because these Australian mammals blow snot bubbles to keep their noses wet, which cools the critters down as the moisture evaporates, a new study concludes.
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