Jack Ashby

And once you take their clothes off, their skeletons are quite similar.

But yeah, echidnas are brilliant animals too.

These spines, they are such a good defensive system.

If they can move them individually, they can lock them into roots and soil and pebbles, so they become immovable.

But my favorite thing about echidnas is what they do with their hands.

If you've ever encountered an echidna,

you walk up to it and it very quickly rolls up into a ball and tucks its head and its legs, the most vulnerable parts, tucks its legs and its head under the spine.

I call that DEFCON 2.

But if they're really scared, what they do is use all four hands and they do jazz hands with all four feet, as they say, and it drills kind of like a handheld blender.

It drills vertically into the soil.

And you just watch them with nothing more than a shimmy.

They just disappear completely.

downwards into the soil, and those feet then lock into roots and pebbles too, and they become completely immovable.

You cannot pick up a platypus that's gone to DEFCON 1.

I'm kidding.

We were at Adventure Bay, yeah, and so we'd seen –

echidnas were actually first encountered by europeans in adventure bay in 1792 which is a nice uh circle to that story but yes i think the story you're talking about is we've been in there we've been looking at echidnas and quolls and the other wonders of bruny island and we've been staying in our car in um in the car park we've been sleeping in the car in the beach car park in adventure bay

as poor young people do, rather than pay to go in the campground.

And every day we'd wake up with a flat battery.

I won't go into what was happening there, but every day we'd go into the Adventure Bay general store and they would lend us, they refused to sell them to us, but they'd lend us jump leads and we'd have to jump start the car.