Las Vegas doesn’t sleep at night, but neither do wallabies; and a recent study into animal behaviour brought the marsupial world a little closer to Sin City.
Curtin University’s Dr Wiebke Ebeling and her colleagues were researching how wallabies perceived colour, to help determine why marsupial colour vision had evolved so selectively.
“We trained tammar wallabies to respond to different colour stimuli by pressing switches on an automated experimental setup, similar to a poker machine,” Ebeling said.
The “poker machines” presented the wallabies with a choice of white and different yellows, greens and blues. The study enabled them to determine which colours the animals could detect, and how their perception differed from other animals.
The prize for a successful choice was a small pellet of food, and the study made some important findings about what the “neutral point” for wallabies was, leading to a finding that wallabies see in a similar way to dogs.
“This study has raised new questions as to why good colour vision evolves so selectively and should be beneficial to the quokka but not the wallaby,” Ebeling said.
Some of the wallabies became less concerned about their winnings once they had eaten enough food – but in what could be seen as a cautionary tale, they kept playing the machines “presumably for the fun of it”, according to Ebeling.
“I'm not saying it got them addicted but they certainly couldn't have done much more during the night,” she said.
It appears that even wallabies need to know when to lay off the slots.
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