Icy
(on left, held by Senior Keeper Karen Davis) and Polar (on right, held by Education
Officer Claire Peterson) - two golden-furred specimens of southern hairy-nosed
wombat housed at Cleland Wildlife Park, Adelaide (©
Tricia Watkinson/Newspix/Rex Features, reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
Willy Wonka had
his much sought-after Golden Tickets, but Cleland Wildlife Park in Adelaide, South
Australia, has something even rarer – golden
wombats! The southern hairy-nosed wombat Lasiorhinus latifrons normally
has black, brown, or grey fur. However, Icy and Polar both sport an
astonishingly beautiful, bright golden pelage, as if King Midas from classical
Greek mythology had gifted them with his gold-transforming touch.
These two
bear-like but herbivorous marsupials are three-and-a-half years old, arriving
at the park after having been found in the wild six months apart of each
another and raised afterwards in a rescue centre. Their golden colouration, a
phenomenon known as flavism, is the result of a mutant gene allele. Yet
although aesthetically exquisite, it makes such wombats very visible in the
wild and therefore highly vulnerable to predators. Consequently, very few
specimens ever survive, and there is only one other golden wombat in captivity.
So Icy and Polar
(although surely Goldie and Sunny might be more apt names for them?) are
extremely special and highly-prized by the park, whose staff hope that they
will breed when older (despite their shared golden hue, they are not related to
one other).
Illustration
from 1865 by Joseph Wolf, depicting two normal-coloured specimens of the southern hairy-nosed
wombat (public domain)
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