Silver Ounce 2020 Australia at Night - Echidna, Coin from Niue - detailed information

Niue, a sovereign state in free association with New Zealand, uses two official legal tender currencies. The New Zealand Dollar is the circulation currency for daily transactions, while the government also authorises legal tender coins in the Niue Dollar currency for collector's purposes.

A number of mints issue a large variety of commemorative, bullion and collector coins under the authority of Niue. These coins are dedicated to historical or general popular culture themes not related to Niue itself. Many of them are in standard bullion sizes - typically, one ounce of silver (abbreviated as 1 oz Ag, where "Ag" comes from the Latin word for silver, Argentum). Many of these feature various animals.

The Echidna coin is the third design in the Australia at Night series of proof coins. The coin has a stylish black finish (probably rhodium plating).

Echidnas are small, relatively primitive mammals that are covered with coarse hair and spines, for which reason they are sometimes called spiny anteaters. Superficially they resemble the anteaters of South America, and other spiny mammals like hedgehogs and porcupines. They have snouts which have the functions of both the mouth and nose. Their snouts are elongated and slender. They have very short, strong limbs with large claws and are powerful diggers. Echidnas have a tiny mouth and a toothless jaw. They feed by tearing open soft logs, anthills and the like with their claws, then using their long, sticky tongue which protrudes from their snout to collect their prey. Long-beaked echidnas have tiny spines on their tongues that help capture their meals.

Echidnas and the duckbill platypus are the only egg-laying mammals, known as monotremes. The female lays a single soft-shelled, leathery egg twenty-two days after mating and deposits it directly into her pouch. Hatching takes ten days; the young echidna, called a puggle, then sucks milk from the pores of the two milk patches (monotremes have no nipples) and remains in the pouch for forty-five to fifty-five days, at which time it starts to develop spines. The mother echidna digs a nursery burrow and deposits the puggle, returning every five days to suckle it until it is weaned at seven months.