To four-year-olds at a Hoppers Crossing kindergarten, it made sense to collect cents to help save the eastern barred bandicoot.
Karobran kindergarten’s 104 pupils raised $200 worth of five-cent pieces in Zoos Victoria’s “common cents challenge”, allowing them to “adopt” a bandicoot at Werribee zoo.
Now extinct in the wild, the bandicoots at birth are the same size as a five-cent coin.
Teacher Sonya Findlow says the children were excited to meet their adopted bandicoot at the zoo, which runs a breeding program and has reintroduced bandicoots in protected areas of its site.
