Echidnas use snot bubbles and belly flops to beat the heat in Australian summers, research finds

Researchers have found that Echidnas' mucus serves a dual purpose, one to clear the dirt from their snouts and second to keep themselves cool. Researchers from Curtin University in Western Australia used thermal imaging to capture the images of Echidnas while they were blowing bubbles of mucus from their noses.
Researchers found that when the mucus bubbles burst at the tip of the echidna's snout, it allows them to perform evaporation to cool down the blood circulation under their skin.

It is an incredibly effective cooling mechanism, environmental physiologist Christine Cooper told the BBC. "We found there's actually a 10-degree celsius difference between some parts of the body and their snout."

According to Dr Cooper, this mechanism of animals in which they use their blood for evaporation is not new but finding an animal that uses snot for doing the same job was a discovery.

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Dr Cooper believes that understanding how echidnas tolerate heat is critical for their conservation on a warming planet because they are one of the world's rarest species and one of theonly two types of monotremes - mammals that lay eggs. And as per thenew research,they have a better chance of survival than previously thought.

People have long assumed monotremes like echidnas are "just not very good physiologically", Dr Cooper says. The animals have a low lethal temperature and were thought to start "dropping dead" at about 35 degrees, she says.

"But in our study, we found them out and about - active, foraging and looking just fine - at ambient temperatures of 37.5 degrees".

"They are probably one of our more heat intolerance species, but we're finding that they're not as hopeless as they are supposed to be... and now we have a mechanism by how they might be managing this."

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