Australia's earthy, 7 days to dig 90 meters deep cave

For several years in a row, Australia has experienced massive and prolonged forest fires, sometimes lasting for months, which have claimed the lives of nearly half a billion animals and caused untold economic damage.

Australia's animals are unique in that they are not only large but also reproduce rapidly. These include such huge numbers of marsupials and highly venomous animals as the wombat, platypus, and Tainan snake, and these endemic animals also died in forest fires.

Some animals were lucky enough to find a "fire hole" when they escaped and were spared in the hole.

They don't like to compete with other animals for territory and live a peaceful life by day and night.

There are many peculiarities about the wombat, such as the standard cubic structure of its droppings; the opening of the wombat's nursery pouch faces backward, which also leads to the possibility of the mother wombat's droppings being pulled right on the baby's head when she defecates.

The wombat is a member of the Australian marsupial mammal family, divided into two genera and three species.

The female wombat is slightly larger than the male and has a more robust body with more muscle mass, making her look very cute and meaty.

Wombats have powerful paws, long and very hard front toenails, and are good at digging holes for nesting, and have flat, broad skulls that allow them to use their heads to push dirt and rocks out of caves when digging quickly.

Female and male wombats only live together during the breeding season, and once the female is pregnant, she will drive the male away, putting the best spin on it. Female wombats give birth to cubs after a gestation period of seven and a half months, with only one cub per litter.

The cubs are usually born in mid-October, and the wombat has to live in a nursery pouch for a year and a half, during which time it can only survive on breast milk. After weaning, the wombat will not leave its mother and will follow her to learn the art of foraging.

After 18 months, the cubs try to live independently and leave their mothers to dig holes and build their offspring.

Wombats have a strong sense of family, and their mothers are so relieved to leave their young that they will follow them around for a while, helping them choose a site to dig a den, which is often close to their mother's den and has plenty of food nearby.

The mother wombat will help the cubs dig and lay grass until they are ready for their new home, and then they will reluctantly leave.

Wombats are true experts at digging underground, with wide, flat front paws, like a sapper's shovel, and strong, powerful limbs that dig holes with ease. In a week, a wombat can dig a cave more than 90 meters deep.

The wombat's metabolism is very slow and each meal often takes more than 10 days to digest, which is comparable to that of koalas and sloths. Wombats are pure vegetarians and do not have the sharp teeth and claws of carnivores, but they do put up a fight in the face of predators.

Because the wombat has a strong defensive weapon: the buttocks, the wombat has cartilage under the buttocks, and the texture is relatively hard, with hand knocking like knocking steel helmet. Even predators like wild dogs can't bite through a wombat's buttocks.

Sometimes it will run up to a predator, anger the enemy with its butt, and then quickly burrow at 40 km/h to seal the hole with its butt.

The wombat lets the predator hold its butt and bite it, but most predators are unable to do any real damage to the wombat and have to return without success.

Wombats are very large, so their holes are also very large, and they leave dozens of escape holes for themselves to escape. Too many holes can also allow predators to enter the cave, and this time the wombat will play hide-and-seek with the predator in the cave.

However, if the predator and the wombat meet in the hole, the wombat will bait the enemy and sink its buttocks, leaving space above the tunnel and between the buttocks.

When the enemy sticks its head into the gap, it will use its buttocks to hit the top of the cave hard, squeezing the natural enemy to death in the hole. Sometimes, it will also collapse the cave, the offender will be buried in the hole, to buy their own escape time.

Contrary to their "large" size, wombats are very timid, and if there is a noise at the entrance of a cave, they are immediately alerted and scare off visitors by growling.

Unlike other animals that have proliferated in Australia, wombat populations are already in jeopardy. Their diet is relatively homogeneous and their metabolism is slow, leading to increasing laziness and a smaller range of activity.

In addition, their reproductive capacity is weak, with only one birth per litter and a long gestation time for a single litter; over the centuries, Australian volcanoes have regularly erupted, affecting the wombat's environment; and humans have hunted and killed wombats with impunity.

Eventually, humans encroached too much on the wombat's territory, resulting in serious damage to their habitat, and more and more domestic animals began to compete with wombats for food.

In the early 20th century, the Australian hairy-nosed wombat in southern Queensland was completely extinct, and the situation of wombats in other areas is not optimistic.

It's no exaggeration to say that if humans don't actively intervene to protect wombats now, they will likely become extinct shortly.