Whittington says that the platypus’s bill feels rubbery and doesn’t hurt. But if you’ve ever wondered whether it’s better to be spiked or bitten by a platypus, go with the bite. There are so many platypus questions still unanswered. Also unknown is how a platypus survives getting injected with a venom that can kill dogs and other animals. But no one knows for sure because platypuses are so difficult to study in the wild. Disabling a competitor would be a big advantage, Whittington says. And someone once found in a net two males that had been fighting, one with temporary paralysis. The males might be using it in fights over territory or access to females, which would explain why only males have venom and only during breeding season. Black Devil Productionsīut what are the platypuses using venom for? Whittington says that scientists don’t yet know. A filmmaker recently captured rare footage of a platypus walking between creeks in Tasmania. Then they figured out which genes were switched on to determine the ones responsible for making venom proteins. They harvested a venom gland from a platypus that had been struck by a car.
So to study the stuff, Whittington and her colleagues took a genetic approach. There’s no way to milk a platypus for venom. Only the males are venomous, Whittington notes, they only make venom during the breeding season, and they don’t make a lot of it.
With snakes, it’s easy to milk the animals and get a lot of venom to study. I asked her why studying the animals’ venom was difficult. “Filming platypus is one of the hardest tasks ever,” Max MollerĪnd this begins to explain part of the conversation I had last week with Camilla Whittington, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney who has studied platypus venom. Trying to film the animals and only recently lucked out with 30 seconds of good footage when one of the animals ambled through his filming site. Even in Australia, the animals have only been successfully bred (with the offspring reaching maturity) twice. In the early to mid-20th century, the Bronx Zoo in New York City tried keeping platypuses on display, but the animals died, and none ever mated. There are no captive platypuses outside of Australia, and it’s now illegal to move them out of the country. That’s not just because the animals are native to eastern Australia and Tasmania. If you want to see a live platypus, though, you have to go to Australia. You can find platypus specimens in lots of natural history museums. And the males have venomous spurs on their hind legs. The weirdness goes beyond your first glance at their duck bills and webbed feet: These are milk-producing mammals that lay eggs. British naturalist George Shaw, who in 1799 was the first person to officially describe the animal for science, originally thought the dead specimen he’d been sent was a hoax. Aboriginal Australian legend says that the platypus was born after a female duck mated with a water-rat. The platypus is one of the oddest animals you’ll ever see.
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