TORONTO – You’re a kangaroo out in the Australian outback looking for some grub, see a tasty looking piece of grass and decide that’s dinner. You go to pick it up with your…right or left paw? According to a new study, most kangaroos will opt to use their left.
Most of the human population — 70 to 95 per cent — are right-handed, what some scientists believe is an evolutionary trait. But not so with kangaroos.
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Yegor Malashichev of Saint Petersburg State University in Russia, co-author of the study that was published in the journal Current Biology has been interested in the handedness of animals for some time. He examined the differences in handedness between jumping and walking frogs (finding that jumping frogs don’t really care about handedness as much as walking frogs). He has also participated in a handedness study in marsupials that walk on all fours. But never before had a study been done on bipedal kangaroos.
The researchers found that kangaroos, specifically eastern grey and red kangaroos, preferred performing tasks — such as grooming its nose, picking a leaf or bending a tree branch — with their left hands.
“What we observed in reality we did not initially expect,” Malashichev says. “But the more we observed, the more it became obvious that there is something really new and interesting in the wild.”
The findings are important as they challenge the widely held belief that handedness is unique to primates.
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