Latest Tammar Wallaby Stories

Marsupial mothers regulate the composition of their milk so that it is optimal for the development stage of their young. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Epigenetics & Chromatin shows that, similar to the human placenta, which regulates embryonic growth and development, insulin appears to be imprinted in the marsupial mammary gland. Insulin is well known as the hormone which regulates blood sugar levels but it also essential for proper functioning of the...

While sequencing the DNA of a member of the kangaroo family for the first time, an international team of researchers believe they have identified the gene responsible for the creature's hop, Judith Burns of BBC News reported on Friday. The project, which is detailed in the latest issue of the journal Genome Biology, centers around the tammar wallaby (Macropus eugenii), a smaller species of kangaroo located on islands off the south and west coasts of Australia. According to Burns, this...

Carbon dioxide may be the most name-dropped greenhouse gas, but methane is 20 times more potent. In 2009, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calculated that 20 percent of the nation's human-related methane emissions were attributable to livestock digestive processes. In Australia, livestock emissions account for 12 percent of the country's total greenhouse gas emissions.To understand how methane is produced in livestock, an international team of scientists including researchers at...

The discovery that a bacterial species in the Australian Tammar wallaby gut is responsible for keeping the animal's methane emissions relatively low suggests a potential new strategy may exist to try to reduce methane emissions from livestock, according to a new study.Globally, livestock are the largest source of methane from human-related activities, and are the third-largest source of this greenhouse gas in the United States, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.Wallabies...

All current Australian marsupials can trace their ancestry back to South America, according to a new study by German researchers from the University of Munster's Institute of Experimental Pathology."While marsupials like the Australian tammar wallaby and the South American opossum seem to be quite different, research by Maria Nilsson and colleagues at the University of Munster"¦ shows otherwise," a press release dated July 27 says."Using sequences of a kind of 'jumping gene,'...