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in its food? Baby Koalas Eat Something Truly Disgusting Newborns aren’t very good at digesting stuff. We mammals have an alternative for babies who aren’t yet ready for real food: milk. All mammals drink milk when they’re first born, even the occasional weird mammal where no one in the species has nipples. You could argue that there’s something gross about babies feeding off body fluids tapped right from their living mother. If a few red blood cells slipped into the breast milk, for example, we might find this vampirism deeply disturbing. But it’s not gross enough for koalas, who in addition to making milk, evolved another way of feeding their young. Mother koalas produce something called pap. Koalas eat almost nothing but eucalyptus leaves, but baby koalas (who are called joeys, after singer Joey Fatone), aren’t able to digest the leaves, which are tough and also poisonous. So once the joey in the pouch starts transitioning off milk, it eats pap, eucalyptus leaves that the mother has already digested. Are you picturing the mother vomiting into the baby’s mouth, like a momma bird? Sorry, the reality’s one step worse than that. The pap comes from the mother’s colon, popping out of the cloaca right after a load of feces, and then the joey engages in some coprophagia. To a layperson, pap is feces, but scientists point out that there’s a difference: Pap contains a whole lot more bacteria, live bacteria, which is essential for the joey to develop its own gut biome. Very rarely are scientists able to observe the production of pap. Zookeepers have recently found themselves able to stimulate pap production artificially, by manually stimulating the mother’s cloaca. The cloaca is also the koala’s reproductive opening, leading to the mother’s three vaginas, and you might not relish the thought of arousing the koala by rubbing it, but it’s all in a day’s work for a zookeeper. For more things zookeeper’s do, check out: - [There Are So Many Dicks Of So Many Sizes]( - [Japanese Zoos Put on Pretend Animal Attacks]( - [We Are Constantly Masturbating Animals]( Top image: [Benjamint444/Wiki Commons]( Daily Digest [15 Stupendous Facts That Totally Twirled Our Mustaches]( By Andrea Meno / November 20th, 2022 [12 Spotify Facts To Stream Into Our Brains]( By JhallComics / November 19th, 2022 [15 Obsolete Technologies That Are, Somehow, Still Thriving Somewhere]( By JhallComics / November 19th, 2022 [‘How The Grinch Stole Christmas’ Is Hornier Than You Remember]( By JM McNab / November 19th, 2022 [Most Hilariously Disastrous Weddings In Film History]( By Maxwell Yezpitelok / November 19th, 2022 [READ MORE]( [fb]( [tw]( [yt]( [Logomark_DIGITAL_Red_50X50-px] [insta png]( [tiktok png]( [ARTICLES]( | [PICTOFACTS]( | [Videos]( Literally media Ltd. 190 West St, Suite 17B, Brooklyn NY 11222 COPYRIGHT © 2005-2022 Cracked is published by Literally media Ltd. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences]( or [unsubscribe from this list](. ONE CRACKED FACT | [View in browser](