From time to time, for our younger readers, we will feature articles about some of the wildlife that makes Florida unique and interesting. This issue, we talk about the nine-banded armadillo, and the opossum.

The nine banded armadillo looks like a Sherman tank-bony cased, with a head like Piglet (from the Pooh books). It is a largely insectivorous mammal. Its large claws aid digging and foraging for the insects it eats.

It is heavy for its size-much heaver than water; so when it needs to cross a stream, it holds its breath (for as long as six minutes), sinks to the bottom, and walks across. If the body of water is too wide to walk, it inflates its intestines and stomach, and paddles across.

It has a unique reproductive process: it produces a single embryo, which can remain dormant for as long as 14 months. The embryo produces four identical offspring-clones, in effect. They are either all male or all female.

John James Audubon first sited the armadillo on Texas in 1849. Since then, they have made their way to Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

The opossum is a marsupial-a mammal with a pouch to hold its young after they are born. Like the armadillo, it is abroad mostly at night. 'Possums are a little larger than a house cat, and half its length is a long, hairless prehensile tail. It can hang from a branch by that tail, and it can aid in grasping. It is omnivorous. It eats eggs, frogs, birds, mice, mushrooms, grains, and fruits, as well as offal (dead animals).

Like the armadillo, it has interesting breeding characteristics. The gestation period is a mere 13 days (vs. 60 days for a house cat). The embryos have no placentas. They are fed by seepage from the inner walls of the mother's womb. There may be as many as 14 to 25 embryos.

After the 13 days, the hairless, eyeless pea-sized embryos are expelled and migrate to the fur pouch under the opossum where each attaches to a nipple and begins to nurse. There are often more babies than nipples, and the weaker babies die. The pouch can close to form a water-tight seal, as the mother goes about her business of foraging and feeding. At nine weeks, the babies emerge, fully formed, and about the size of a newborn mouse, and attach themselves to the mother's tail, snout, ears and fur. They return to the pouch to feed and gradually wean to solid real food as they learn to forage for themselves. They are on their own at 14 weeks. Possums live about three to five years. The mother can produce two litters a year.