Changing Baby Koala’s Diet

◆ The bearlike koala, an animal indigenous to Australia, dines only on the leaves of the eucalyptus tree. Naturally, baby koalas must have milk. However, when they reach six months of age they are helped to adapt to a vegetal diet. How this change of diet occurs is a curious phenomenon. François Bourlière describes it in his book The Natural History of Mammals:

“At the time of the weaning . . . the mother is able to provide her offspring with a kind of pap made of eucalyptus leaves which the young eats directly from the mother’s anus. This vegetable ‘soup’ contains no excrement and is produced during only one month, every two or three days, between three and four o’clock in the afternoon. At this period the growth of the young is greatly accelerated.”