![]() To catch them, they set tunnel-like traps - netting stretched across a series of metal hoops, with long “wings” on either side of the opening to guide the platypus inside. ![]() Researchers often spend hours standing in streams waiting for the nocturnal animals to appear, and all-night watches are not uncommon. Gathering even the most basic information about platypuses has required tremendous dedication. The platypus is one of only two mammals in the world that lays eggs - usually one or two per season that the female incubates under her tail. Where the human imprint has altered the platypus’s native waterways, habitat fragmentation, water pollution, fishing nets, dams, and urban development have pushed many populations into decline, Griffiths says. While some populations are faring well, these tend to be in remote, wild areas. “The biggest thing we’re learning is that platypuses are in trouble,” says Joshua Griffiths, a biologist for an environmental consulting firm on the outskirts of Melbourne who has spent many sleepless nights capturing platypuses in area streams to learn more about the secretive animals. The more researchers learn about the species’ life history, whereabouts, and habitat, though, the more they realize just how much of a threat humans pose to its long-term survival. (Credit: Douglas Gimesy)ĭespite those formidable challenges, over the past 20 years, a few determined scientists - aided by technological advances such as acoustic trackers and environmental DNA (bits of genetic information that an animal sheds into its surroundings) - have begun to illuminate the platypus’s world like never before. Active at night and living much of their lives underwater, their habits are the opposite of their human observers’.Ī researcher releases a captured platypus back into Woori Yallock Creek, in Victoria, Australia. That’s largely because, unlike other iconic Australian species like the slow-moving, tree-hugging koala or the ubiquitous kangaroo, platypuses are maddeningly difficult to study. “Long after the evidence was wrested from Nature half a world away from where the debate raged, biologists continued to argue about this paradoxical creature.”įor much of the two centuries since Western scientists began trying to make sense of this furry egg-laying animal - which shares its reproductive strategy with only one other mammal, the echidna - the scientific literature amounted to little more than descriptions of its odd looks, historical accounts of sightings in this river or that, and cursory observations about its anatomy and life history. Hall in a 1999 BioScience article on the history of scientific debate over the species. Thus ensued “a rivalry that pitted nation against nation, naturalist against naturalist, and professional against amateur,” wrote evolutionary biologist Brian K. Early European settlers took to calling the strange, semi-aquatic mammals they found living in eastern Australian streams “duckmoles.” When Captain John Hunter, the second governor of the New South Wales colony, sent a specimen of the creature to British naturalist George Shaw in 1798, Shaw initially thought it was a hoax. With the bill of a duck, the body of an otter, and the tail of a beaver, the platypus ( Ornithorhynchus anatinus ) has a long history of confounding the humans who’ve encountered it.
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