Why Australia Is Pouch-Swapping Wallaby Joeys

I’m not a huge fan of the story of the ugly duckling for two reasons: 1. The message is basically “Yeah, you might be ugly, but later you might not be; so hang in there,” which doesn’t seem very edifying, and 2. The story has an unspoken subtext of the ugly ducking is one of a kidnapping or some sort of double tragedy—where are that swan’s parents, and why is it being raised around all these asshole ducks?

But what’s playing out in Australia right now may shed some light on how one species ends up raising another: conservationists are plucking baby wallabies—joeys—from their mother’s pouches and planting them in another wallaby’s pouch.

It sounds like a horrible affront to nature, right? The scientists aren’t just doing this as part of a nature versus nurture experiment with the cutest subject possible—they’re doing it to save the species.

The brush-tailed rock and tammar wallaby are two of the smallest and most endangered types of wallaby, and scientists are taking joeys from these species and putting them in the pouches of the common rock wallaby. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, marsupial reproduction experts, the empty pouch allows the mother wallaby to reproduce again within 30 days. Rather than having just one joey a year, the researchers hope the mother wallaby can have up to eight.

“It's one of the special features really that marsupial reproduction offers us in conservation," said John Rodger, a professor at University of Newcastle involved in the project. "The equivalent of the embryo develops in the mother's pouch. And so it's possible—which you can't do with an animal like us or a cow or a sheep—to actually take a little baby early in its development from one pouch and put it into another.”

As far as whether this is nature versus nurture, nature seems to be winning out, and the brush-tailed rock and tammar wallabies don't take on the behavior of the common rock wallaby. "So they're hard-wired to be whatever their own species is," said Rodger.

"Nature wins out." I guess that's also sort of the message of the ugly ducking, come to think of it.