Movements Aerate Soil

Biological Strategy

Short-beaked echidna

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Protect From Dirt/solids

When dirt and other small solids adhere to living systems, they can slow them down, create blockages, reduce their ability to carry out vital functions, or cause surface wear and tear. Due to electrostatic forces, it’s easy for dirt and other solids to adhere to surfaces, so living systems must overcome those forces. An earthworm, for example, uses a small electric current to keep soil particles from adhering to its body as it moves through the soil. This enables it to move more efficiently by reducing drag.

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Protect From Loss of Gases

Gases are part of most living systems’ environment, especially those exposed to the earth’s atmosphere. Many gases are crucial to survival, with the two most important being oxygen and carbon dioxide. In some environments, oxygen or other essential gases may be in low supply, such as underwater where there’s been a decrease in the amount of dissolved gases. Living systems must have strategies to survive in that depleted environment. An example is a shark that reduces its respiration rate to survive when oxygen levels are low.

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Distribute Gases

Gases of particular importance to living systems are oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. Oxygen and carbon dioxide are involved in respiration, so distributing these gases efficiently and effectively is important for a living system’s survival. However, gases are difficult to contain because they disperse easily. To accommodate this, living systems have strategies for confining gases and using gases’ properties to their advantage. For example, prairie dogs and mound-building termites build systems of tunnels and mounds that take advantage of wind to ventilate their underground homes.

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Mammals

Class Mammalia (“breast”): Bats, cats, whales, horses, humans

Mammals make up less than 1% of all animals on earth, but they include some of the most well-known species. We know first-hand some of the characteristics that make mammals unique, like having hair, being able to sweat, and producing milk through mammary glands. Another critical shared feature is a set of highly-specialized teeth. Unlike sharks or alligators, for example, whose teeth are generally all the same size and shape, mammals have differently shaped teeth in different areas of the jaws to target specific foods or foraging strategies.

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The echidna respires while buried underground by using its snout to move the soil around its head, enabling access to the air trapped between soil particles.

“Short-beaked echidnas have an impressive ability to submerge completely into soil or sand and remain there, cryptic, for long periods. This poses questions about how they manage their respiration, cut off from a free flow of gases…it was noticed that echidnas often showed periodic movements of the anterior part of the body, as if such movements were a deliberate effort to flush the tidal air space surrounding their nostrils. These ‘flushing movements’ were subsequently found to temporarily increase the levels of interstitial oxygen in the soil around the head region. Flushing movements were more frequent while V_O₂ was higher during the burrowing process, and also in substrate with lower f_a. We conclude that oxygen supply to buried echidnas is maintained by diffusion through the soil augmented by periodic flushing movements, which ventilate the tidal airspace that surrounds the nostrils.” (Waugh et al. 2006:938)

Image: KeresH / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY SA - Creative Commons Attribution + ShareAlike

Initially similar in appearance to a common hedgehog, the short-beaked echidna has many unique or extremely rare characteristics, including being one of the few egg-laying mammals.

Last Updated May 10, 2018

References

Journal article

Respiration by buried echidnas Tachyglossus aculeatus

Journal of Experimental Biology | 15/02/2006 | C. A. Waugh

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Reference

Journal article

Home Ranges, Movement, and Den Use in Long-Beaked Echidnas,Zaglossus bartoni, From Papua New Guinea

J Mammal | 14/04/2009 | Muse D. Opiang

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