As you may have guessed, keeping up on current medicine and techniques in many species involves a lot of ongoing continuing education.  I read quite a few journals and sometimes come across a really interesting tidbit.  I thought others might like to hear about some of these things so from time to time.

This week, in reading the Veterinary Clinics of North America journal on Exotic Animal Practice, I came across this interesting fact.  Macropods (kangaroos), have four mammary glands.  A joey only attaches to one teat.  Now here is where it gets really interesting.  A mother kangaroo can have a joey in the process of being weaned but still feeding, one attached in the pouch and one in the uterus in the line up to be born.  Each of the mammary glands will be in a different stage of development and producing a different type of milk for the different age of joeys.  One gland will have milk for a joey that is out of the pouch but still nursing, another will have a different milk appropriate for a joey that is in the pouch and latched on a teat, and the others not producing milk at all.  Having each gland produce different types of milk for a different age joey at the same time is pretty cool.  Of course, as you can imagine, hand raising joeys has a whole different set of challenges because of the different types of milk the mom produces.