Marsupial reproduction front-loads very little into the uterus. In Perameles the gestation period is around 12.5 days, and the young emerges as a barely formed embryo with functional forelimbs and mouth and almost nothing else, crawls to the pouch and attaches to a teat. Development that a placental mammal completes internally happens there instead, over roughly eight weeks. The bandicoot figure held the mammalian record until the stripe-faced dunnart, a small dasyurid, was timed at about eleven days.
Bandicoots are unusual among marsupials in having a chorioallantoic placenta, structurally closer to the placental-mammal arrangement than the yolk-sac placenta of kangaroos, though it lacks the elaborate villi and functions only briefly. Litters of two to four are common and a female can raise several in a year, which is a large part of why the species recovers quickly where predators are excluded.
The fast turnover has not been enough on its own. Foxes and cats removed the bandicoot from mainland Victoria almost entirely, and the reintroduced populations persist behind predator-proof fences and on fox-free islands, with guardian dogs trialled at one site.