Emus are a great help to their environment, and play a key role in tons of Australian animals’ food chains. By helping grow plants all over the grassy plains where they live, they assure a lot of animals are eating right. Yum.

So what would the effect of losing the emu be?

Well, you’d see a great impact on the amount of food sources and animals left in australia. When an emu eats, they swallow their food whole, including seeds. Later, when they go to the bathroom, seeds come out whole and fertilized, ready to be grown into a tasty snack for others.

Once grown, the plants, seeded by the emu, make a great food source for tons of other animals. From bandicoots, to the wombats, and even the koala! They all rely on plants as a main food source, without the help of the emu, we would see a serious impact on the thrive of these species, and the animals that eat them too.

For example, without the wombat, foxes would have a decrease in food. Sure, they eat other animals too, but those animals also tend to rely on plants as a main food source as well. If they can’t find food, then they die out, then the fox can’t find food, so they die out. Do you really want foxes to die?

The emus are also a food source, as well. Though having minimal predators, that doesn’t mean they’re not important. The emu is prey to the dingo, the dingo is prey to the crocodile, and so on. Remove one, and you see a negative impact on the rest of the chain.

Even if you don’t like emus, surely, you don’t want other animals connected to them to die? Who would want that?

Of course, while the emu may not be the coolest looking animal, you can’t deny its importance to its habitat. That in itself makes them pretty cool, don’t you think? They have tons of cool adaptations and an even cooler way of helping other animals! An animal like that deserves to be a winner.

Besides, emus have already won one war, so who's to say they can’t win a battle like this? They sure are ready to!

Think about your vote, and put it into an animal you know makes an impact. Vote emu!

THORNY DEVIL: ONWARD TO THE PODIUM

Aren't you tired of seeing the same 2 animals since the beginning of MAM? Don’t you want to see something new, something spikey? Something you haven’t seen for three rounds aka three weeks? 

Like,  picture this: You’re on a trip through Arid Australia, on an animal expedition, observing the animals living in the Australian desert. The sun is high and bright in the sky, temperatures reaching 30oC.  The car abruptly comes to a stop and you hear a crack underneath the tires.  

Chances are, you just ran over a Thorny Devil and provided a Goanna a meal. Goannas are lizards that feed on other lizards and bugs - they’re important to the ecosystem and food chain because they control animal populations, by being an apex predator, which keeps the ecosystem stable. Without the Thorny Devil, the Goanna would probably starve, which would unravel the thread of the ecosystem.

The Thorny Devil has always been overlooked. For starters, there’s hardly any research done on them - and yet the Thorny Devil can drink water through its skin. Imagine what else this lizard could do! You may think that the Thorny Devil is feeble and fragile - easily killed. But with its skill in camouflaging, it’s no surprise that the Thorny Devil continues to thrive, even though it gets crushed under vehicles while sunbathing.  It may be a little bit too good at camouflaging, considering the fact that the tragic death of a Thorny Devil is getting run over. 

Isn't it amazing that mother nature created this spiky ball of death and gave it a fake head so that it can protect itself? 

The Thorny Devil laughs in the face of sharp teeth, talons and claws. Seriously, it does. It rolls into a ball, flexing its honed spikes and scrapes the inside of its predator's throat even while it’s being eaten. If it's going down, it’s going down with a fight.

Along with that, the Thorny Devil feasts on ants. Seriously - all it eats are ants. It prevents infestation and overpopulation by eating 1,000+ ants. That’s a lot of ants.

If all those ants weren’t eaten, what if they got overpopulated? The ecosystem would fall apart and so would the food chain! You’d be having picnics with ants rather than your friends. What if they cause an infestation? Nobody wants an abundance of pests. So who controls their population? You guessed it, the Thorny Devil!! 

As mentioned earlier, Goannas feed on the decomposing corpse of the Thorny Devil. Which makes sense - since they’re scavengers. Goannas are apex predators and are crucial to the ecosystem - Like I said, they control lizard populations and bugs.

The Brown Falcon also feeds on the Thorny Devil. Though the falcon isn’t as reliant on it, seeing the fact that it can barely see the Thorny Devil from the sky because of its camouflage.

It can be assumed that the Thorny Devil doesn’t rely on most of the things offered by the environment because they mainly eat ants anyway and drink water from their skin.

Our lizard spends its life eating ants and drinking water through its skin. In solitary. It should move forward- stand on the podium and claim what it rightfully deserves - acknowledgement and representation. After all, everyone deserves a chance. Even chocolate bar sized lizards that look like Pokemons.