Physical Description:
Parma Wallaby have a greyish-brown back and shoulders, a white throat and chest and a dark stripe along their spines. Their tails are relative as long as their body size. They also have distinct white cheek stripe and most possess a white tail tip. Males are larger that the female.
Social Organization::
They are consider solitary; two or at most three animals sometimes coming together to feed in favourable circumstances.
Special Adaptations:
They provide no immediate threat to it provided that more habitat destruction does not take place, and the population is thought to be slowly increasing.
Reproductive Behavior:
The behavioural time budgets of males and females were reliably different, with males spending more time actively foraging than females. Social interactions were rare in both sexes, but we were able to characterise sexual behaviour in detail. Courtship typically began with sexual checking of the female by the male, after which the male pawed the female's rump repeatedly. This was occasionally followed by mounting and copulation, but typically the male then presented his chest, drawing the female's head toward it with his forepaws. While this 'head-rubbing' is clearly homologous with components of social behaviour in other wallabies, it seems uniquely elaborate in parmas. Interactions between males and females were accompanied by characteristic vocalisations. Males produced repeated broad-band 'clucking' sounds while luring females, which often responded by hissing. The structure and context of these signals suggest that clucks function to stimulate the female, while hisses probably encode threat. It is likely that males produce both olfactory and acoustic signals during courtship; such cues could play a role in female mate choice decisions.
The Animal at the Zoo:
I managed to see the Parma Wallaby move only once. They are usely loners in sense they did not gather with each other or other marsupials. Maybe it because the weather in Texas is so hot and that they are consider noctornal animals that during the day the were just still.
Page Author:
Anonymous
Sources and Links:
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com
http://www.krazyworld.com/animals-parma-wallaby.htm
http://www.noldus.com/site/content
