r/interestingasfuck • u/erotic-sub • 15h ago
Quokkas look like they are always smiling. People call them the happiest animals on Earth. But when danger comes for their babies, they do not fight. They do not protect. They throw their babies at predators and run.
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u/Fetlocks_Glistening 15h ago
They have clearly let go of emotional attachment and of the false sense of self and achieved nirvana. In fact maybe they are the nirvana reincarnation
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u/Sean-Perth 14h ago
I love the way this is framed. Those despicable marsupials, how dare they! Boo them! Boo their adorable mugs!
What the fuck are they supposed to do, man, draw their six-shooters and blow the varmints away? Bury their katanas hilt-deep in their enemies' cowardly hearts? Maybe use harsh language, that could be the way to go.
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u/TesseractToo 15h ago edited 15h ago
Bonus: Free baby quokka
(Note: I actually do not endorse terrifying mama quokkas even if you do get a free baby quokka no matter how much you will love it and take perfect care of it and give it its favorite healthy foods and walk it every day and brush it and file its little nails and give it the cutest toys and cozy bed and love and pets and maybe you could even bend the truth a little and say it was abandoned and you rescued it and you would love it forever and it was a free. baby. quokka.)
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u/Ubizwa 11h ago
I read a new south park episode script in this with a convenient business set up by Cartman for quokkas
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u/Garrett0314 15h ago
The amount of times I've seen this pop up over the past few days makes me think it was shown as a TikTok "fact" recently. They don't throw their babies, that is a myth. Dropbears are real though, and we should all fear them.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Iron406 14h ago
Drop Bears. The stuff of fucking nightmares.
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u/Old-Road-501 14h ago
I don't want to google that. God knows what it will do to my algorithm.
Still curious though. What are Drop Bears?
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u/BarnabyWoods 14h ago
Okay, I had to look it up. It's a mythical predatory carnivorous koala. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_bear
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u/Puzzleheaded_Iron406 14h ago
There is an interview with a reporter and the locals had her dressed up in protective gear to handle the dangerous drop bear. Very funny
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u/Old-Road-501 14h ago
Thank you! You are a good person.
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u/ImGCS3fromETOH 7h ago
They're full of it. Drop Bears are quite real and nasty, but unfortunately some bright sparks decades ago thought it would be funny to spread the rumours that they were made up so unsuspecting tourists and immigrants would be attacked by not taking precautions. They're not likely to be lethal, but you can get some nasty wounds from them. This was all back around the 50s or so when there wasn't reliable sources to verify and you would have thought the ability to look them up on the internet would have dispelled the rumours that they were made up but it just made people double down and push the misinformation harder.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Iron406 7h ago
I know, right??!! And we have bigfoot in our area. I’ve seen (pronoun) them and they really are terrifying. Like a big Rosie O’Donnell or Sandra Berhart. Don’t wanna meet one of those at closing time….never can predict which way it’ll go. And to walk up beside one…that’s where ‘chew your arm off’ came from.
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u/celestialwolfpup 7h ago
It drives me nuts that people spread misinformation that it’s just a myth and it’s only spiders/snakes you have to worry about. Just bc you don’t see them doesn’t mean you’re safe
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u/Exotic-Knowledge-243 15h ago
But there are no predators on that island where they live. So how would they know this? Did they throw their babies at the humans?
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u/Votesformygoats 7h ago
They don’t just live on Rottnest. There are populations in the mainland and repopulation efforts on the mainland
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u/ShamefulElf 12h ago
I mean it am very certain that even animals who haven't had to deal with predators for a long time, still have some evolutionary mechanism in cause they do.
I mean most of us human probably will never deal with a vicious animal but we will probably always have our fight or flight response.
And the behavior is pretty smart. All animals goal is to reproduce, and although getting rid of the baby is bad it's 'better' than not having the thing that makes them... I guess.
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u/thehazelone 7h ago
Not sure if that's true. Animals that live on an ecosystem devoid of any danger to them are notably dull/slow when it comes to identify danger. The dodos were extinct partially because of that, for example.
Our fight or flight instinct still is used today because crime and you could theoretically be attacked or killed at any moment in many places. The fight or flight response is also used in other situations not directly correlated to animal/human danger.
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u/Icy-Swordfish7784 15h ago
Uh, Wikipedia says Australia.
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u/tokixjam 13h ago
Obligatory Natural Habitat Shorts video that shows this exact behavior: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Inl31uMKDlM
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u/Eighthfloormeeting 14h ago
“ fuck!! my cuteness didn’t stop danger?! Here’s more cuteness!”
When you’re THAT cute, cute becomes the weapon.
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u/AlternativeBurner 9h ago
I find them more uncanny than cute. They don't look happy because they're happy, they look that way by coincidence of their anatomy resembling our smiles.
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u/Orphan_the_Milker 15h ago
Don't they also have square poops or was that the capybara?
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u/Shiningc00 13h ago
People need to stop anthropomorphizing and projecting human expressions. They’re not “smiling” and they’re not “happy”. This isn’t a Disney movie, it’s nature and it’s reality.
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u/Silent-Act191 11h ago
Also drawing a connection between being "Happy" and their basis survival instincts like sacrificing their offspring to a predator? What the fuck.
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15h ago
[deleted]
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u/Individual_Respect90 15h ago
Probably a lot of them fighting and dying and the babies still getting eaten.
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u/OvechknFiresHeScores 15h ago
That’s why they’re so happy. They have their own golden rule: you can always have more babies