The glory of the duckbill platypus

December 17, 2015 • 12:00 pm

by Matthew Cobb

The platypus is the most extraordinary animal. It lives in Eastern Australia, and when samples of it first arrived in Europe, people assumed it was some kind of spoof, a duck’s bill and webbed feet stuck onto an otter. It is, of course, a monotreme mammal (the other member of this group is the echidna): it lays eggs and suckles its young by oozing out milk through glands in a network under its belly skin, rather than focused into nipples. Their fur is remarkably thick (I have touched a stuffed one).

Males have sharp horny spurs on their rear feet that are venomous. The other day, the Official Tw*tter feed for Threatened Species Commissioner at Australian Govt Dept of the Environment (yes, that’s what it’s called), tw**ted this:

I had never seen the spurs on a live platypus before – pretty amazing, eh?

Now look closely just above the spur. See those little blobs? They are ticks, which are specific to platypuses, Ixodes ornithorhynchi. These ticks can transmit a nasty red blood cell parasite… Vets in Australia often have to treat platypuses having those nasty parasites.

Here’s a rather more cheerful tw**t, a video showing a platypus being released into the wild. This one has more or less the same build as my ex-kitten, Harry, who is getting a bit porky…

20 thoughts on “The glory of the duckbill platypus”

  2. And their sex chromosomes are weird. Instead of an XY system as in most mammals, they have an XXXXXYYYYY system.

  3. I had the pleasure and privilege of seeing two platypuses (platypi?) frolicking in the very small Snowy River in NSW, near the town of Dalgety. That was a wonderful thing to see.

  4. The platypus has to be one of the weirdest animals in Australia – a land of curiosities by world standards though to me a demonstration of the diversity of life. It wasn’t inevitable that placental mammals dominated every continent after the K-T extinction event.

      1. As a follow-up, I’ll point out that the picture shows one placental mammal and about fourteen different insects living off of it. And that’s just in the small skin area we can see. So which is more successful?

  7. One of the mysteries about the platypus, and a source of controversy throughout the c19, was whether it laid eggs or hatched the young within its body. The question was finally answered in 1884 by the English biologist William Caldwell, who managed to shoot (sadly) a platypus in the process of laying eggs, and reported the news in a 4-word telegram that has found its way into the Australian Dictionary of Quotations: “Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic”. You can sometimes see one if you go swimming in the Murrumbidgee river, near Canberra.

  9. I live in Melbourne (Australia), 15 minutes from the city centre. I can walk up the road to our park Westerfolds) and stand on the bridge overlooking the Yarra River, at dusk, and see the platypus family frolicking.
    How lucky am I?

  10. I live in Canada, but have long had a fascination with Platypus….

    duck billed beavers that lay eggs and the boys are poisonous

    weirdest.mammal.ever

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