Long-nosed Potoroo

Fascinating facts about the Long-nosed Potoroo

• A nose the size of a marble leads one of Australia's rarest mammals on a constant treasure hunt through the forest floor. The long-nosed potoroo can smell fungi buried 10 centimetres underground and digs cone-shaped holes to extract it — leaving a trail of excavations that looks like someone's been practising putting on a golf course. Fungi makes up 80% of its diet, which means this 500-gram marsupial is one of Australia's most important fungal dispersers, spreading spores across the forest in its droppings.
• Fewer than 5,000 long-nosed potoroos survive in the wild today, clustered in a handful of forests along Australia's east coast — yet almost nobody has heard of them. They hunt at night and rest in dense leaf litter during the day, making them nearly invisible despite living in some of Australia's most visited national parks. A species can vanish quietly.
• A single litter takes just 38 days from conception to birth, and mothers raise only one joey at a time — an investment strategy that leaves zero margin for error. If a female loses her young to a fox or feral cat, she cannot breed again that year. This slow reproduction means populations recover at a glacial pace once they've been knocked back by habitat loss or predators.
• Foxes arrived in Australia 170 years ago and have no memory of potoroos evolving defences against them. Before European settlement, potoroos had only dingoes and native predators to avoid — animals they'd learned to outmanoeuvre over millions of years. The fox rewrote the rules overnight, and in Tasmania, where foxes only arrived in the 1990s, potoroo populations are collapsing faster than anywhere else.
• Dense, wet forest thick with ferns and fallen logs is the only home a potoroo can survive in — but loggers see money in those same trees. Conservation hinges entirely on protecting scattered patches of old-growth forest, some smaller than a few hundred hectares. In a landscape being reshaped by clearing and fire, this marsupial's survival depends on humans drawing lines on a map and keeping their chainsaws out.

At a glance

About the Long-nosed Potoroo

In the shadowy undergrowth of eastern Australia's forests, the long-nosed potoroo weaves a secretive path, its oversized snout twitching with every scent and sound as it forages for the tender shoots and fungi that sustain it. With a gentle, loping gait, this small, wallaby-like marsupial moves unseen, its earthy coat blending seamlessly into the leaf litter as it navigates the dense, moss-carpeted world that is its domain. As it pauses to nibble on a particularly succulent morsel, the potoroo's large, dark eyes gleam with a quiet, unassuming intelligence, a testament to the remarkable adaptability of this often-overlooked creature.

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