How many baby Wongai ningauis are in a litter?
A Wongai ningaui (Ningaui ridei) usually gives birth to around 5 babies.With 2 litters per year, that sums up to a yearly offspring of 10 babies.
Each of those little ones spend around 13 days as a fetus before they are released into the wild. Upon birth, they weight 499 grams (1.1 lbs) and measure 2.3 cm (0′ 1″). They are a member of the Dasyuridae family (genus: Ningaui). An adult Wongai ningaui grows up to a size of 7.8 cm (0′ 4″).
To have a reference: Humans obviously usually have a litter size of one ;). Their babies are in the womb of their mother for 280 days (40 weeks) and reach an average size of 1.65m (5′ 5″). They weight in at 62 kg (137 lbs), which is obviously highly individual, and reach an average age of 75 years.
Wongai ningaui, a common name of Ningaui ridei, is a tiny carnivorous marsupial native to the arid open grasslands of inland Australia. Their diet is mainly small insects, and occasionally larger prey such as spiders, grasshoppers and cockroaches, which they forage for at the ground and in clumps of spinifex. They have long and untidy fur, grey or gingery brown with longer black hairs, small ears, a narrow muzzle, and possess a partially prehensile tail and feet that allow them to climb. The population occurs sparsely across a wide area and common in favourable habitat, especially in years of good rainfall. Ningaui ridei was first described in 1975, one of two species of a new genus discovered amongst the poorly known mammals of the western regions of Australia.
Other animals of the family Dasyuridae
Wongai ningaui is a member of the Dasyuridae, as are these animals:
- Chestnut dunnart with 8 babies per pregnancy
- Lesser hairy-footed dunnart with 5 babies per pregnancy
- Fawn antechinus with 10 babies per pregnancy
- Tasmanian devil with 2 babies per pregnancy
- Slender-tailed dunnart with 8 babies per pregnancy
- White-tailed dunnart weighting only 25 grams
- Short-furred dasyure weighting only 161 grams
- Carpentarian dunnart weighting only 25 grams
- Little long-tailed dunnart with 7 babies per pregnancy
- Agile antechinus with 10 babies per pregnancy
Animals that share a litter size with Wongai ningaui
Those animals also give birth to 5 babies at once:
- Coypu
- Red wolf
- Common degu
- Water vole (North America)
- Mongolian hamster
- Shaw’s jird
- Hispid cotton rat
- New Guinean rat
- Sminthopsis laniger
- Montane vole
Animals that get as old as a Wongai ningaui
Other animals that usually reach the age of 2 years:
- Mongolian gerbil with 2 years
- Hoary bat with 2.08 years
- Müller’s giant Sunda rat with 2 years
- Honey possum with 2 years
- Eastern harvest mouse with 2.17 years
- Panamanian spiny pocket mouse with 1.75 years
- Eurasian pygmy shrew with 2 years
- Norway lemming with 2 years
- Robinson’s mouse opossum with 2 years
- Cinereus shrew with 1.92 years
Animals with the same weight as a Wongai ningaui
What other animals weight around 9 grams (0.02 lbs)?
- Western long-tongued bat weighting 8 grams
- Leach’s single leaf bat weighting 8 grams
- Dark-winged lesser house bat weighting 9 grams
- Blackish small-eared shrew weighting 8 grams
- Philippine forest roundleaf bat weighting 9 grams
- Northern broad-nosed bat weighting 8 grams
- Bourret’s horseshoe bat weighting 8 grams
- Townsend’s big-eared bat weighting 10 grams
- Chocolate wattled bat weighting 8 grams
- Micronycteris nicefori weighting 8 grams