No need to drink or pee. They excrete only tiny droplets of hyper-concentrated urine very occasionally, so they don’t really pee. Efficient breathing. Kangaroo rats have long snouts that allow them to resorb water from their exhaled breaths within their nasal cavity.

Nocturnal. As nocturnal animals, kangaroo rats are active at night. This is when they search for food, such as grass seeds and insects. Because they are busy all night, they spend the day resting.

10 years

After all, they’ve been reported to survive several months without a drop of water. However, they’ve got nothing on the kangaroo rat. That’s because the kangaroo rat can go literally its entire life without once drinking water.

the kangaroo rat Dipodomys merriami is one of a number of mammalian species that are known to concentrate their urine to more than 6,000 mosmol/kgH2O (5), nearly twice as high as that of the laboratory rat.

The ability of the kangaroo rat and other desert rodents to produce a hyper-concentrated urine is attributed to their possession of extremely long loops of Henle, which is often quoted as an extreme adaptation for life in parched deserts.

While the desert kangaroo rats do consume available water, the vast majority of their water requirements are met from byproducts of metabolic processes. Adaptation to very low quantities of water (free or metabolic) is highlighted by the very long water turnover times for the species, on the order of 2–3 weeks.

The kangaroo rat’s kidneys are especially efficient and produce only small quantities of urine, which is highly concentrated. They are said to have very long loops of Henle. These long loops of Henle give a greater opportunity for water to be reabsorbed.

In low latitude deserts, daily air temperature may reach 40 – 50 oC, and surface temperatures may reach 60 – 70 oC! Mammals now faced with reverse heat gradient. More difficult to maintain Tb below Ta than to regulate heat loss when Tb above Ta. Primary mechanism used by mammals to dump heat is evaporative cooling.

Kangaroo rats’ highly sensitive hearing allows them to hear low-frequency sounds and detect sudden surprise attacks, necessary for avoiding predators. They also have enlarged hindlimb muscles and thick tendons, allowing for the rapid vertical leaps and high accelerations.

Except for large pythons that may prey on small wallabies, kangaroos are not a natural food source for most snakes. Human carers haven’t worked out what this is, so hand-raised released kangaroos are at greater risk of snake bite. Video: Snake trying to eat a pademelon (small wallaby), but the wallaby is just too big.

The California kangaroo rat (Dipodomys californicus) is a species of rodent in the family Heteromyidae. However, populations are declining, having not fully recovered after the drought in California from 2013-2015 destroyed their habitat (the grasslands) and changed it into desert.