Maternal Care

Life stages of a wallaby:

• Joey – from birth until pouch is permanently vacated – 0-9months
• Young-at-foot – has vacated pouch, but is still following mother closely. From 9-18 months
• Sub-adult – is relatively independent from mother, but still smaller than adult. Females may breed for the first time around 18 months, but are still noticeably smaller than adult females until 24 months. Males breed at 24 months, but are not full grown until the third year (Kaufman 1974b).

Red-necked Wallby. photo used with permission from: http://www.geocities.com/ozwildlife/redneckedwallaby.html

The maternal care of the whiptail wallaby is determinate on the fact that their young are ‘followers.’ These young wallabies follow their mothers constantly (Fisher 2002). This is opposed to the young of ‘hiders’ which “do not follow their mothers in the initial period after birth, but lie concealed in vegetation” (Fisher 2002). The mothers of hiders generally do not stray farther than 100m away from the young, and return frequent to suckle (Fisher 2002). When the female is ready to permanently exclude her young from the pouch, at the end of the offspring’s young-at-foot stage, she will move to a part of the home range which is not frequented by other macropods in order to stop the young from being confused in this period of rejection (MacDonald 2001).

Red-necked wallaby mother and joey. Photo used with permission from http://www.hedweb.com/animimag/wallabies.htm

Some subadult male whiptail wallabies leave their natal mobs and join others, but no females were observed to do this (Nowak 1991).

Red-necked wallaby 'pinkie' in pouch. photo used with permission from http://www.wiresnr.org/wallabies.html

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This website was completed in partial fufillment of the requirements for Biology 323, Animal Behavior, at Davidson College in the Spring Semester 2007.