This means that the young must slurp the milk from their mother’s fur. Platypus milk is produced by mammary glands on the female’s chest, yet platypuses (and echidnas) lack nipples. While the egg tooth is shed after a couple of days, the caruncle, a knob on the snout that also aids the young in hatching, remains for several months, during which puggles use it to stimulate the flow of milk from their mother’s body. Their young, called puggles, break out of their leathery eggs with the help of an “egg tooth,” a feature also possessed by young birds. The more one knows about platypuses, the more amazed one becomes. Fossils of platypuses from 64 million years ago have been found in southern South America, so it is probably more accurate to think of them as Antarctic rather than Australian creatures. Indeed, it seems that their electrosensitive abilities developed as a means to help them find food during the dark and frigid three-month polar winter. A recent study suggests that the monotremes first arose 130 million years ago inside the south polar circle, at a time when Australia and Antarctica were joined. The fact that platypuses can survive in such frigid conditions is not surprising. The experience was transformative and has drawn him back repeatedly to the Tasmanian highlands, even in the depths of winter, when the lakes are skinned with ice and the Roaring Forties blow rain and snow into his face. The development and perfection of this novel and highly effective sense allows them to locate food even in dark and muddy water.Īshby’s first sighting of a living platypus occurred in Tasmania’s wilderness, a World Heritage site, where he was fortunate enough to observe one from just five feet away. Using specialized cells located in their bills, they can detect the electrical fields given off by all living things. Only in 1986 did they discover that monotremes-the order of egg-laying mammals that includes platypuses and echidnas, and that today is found only in Australia and on New Guinea-possess a sense that other mammals almost entirely lack. Platypuses close off both their ears and their eyes when they dive, yet for almost two centuries scientists showed a remarkable lack of interest in how they find so much food. A lactating female can eat her own weight in worms, freshwater crayfish, and other invertebrates each day. The food requirements of platypuses are prodigious. The battle lasted twenty minutes before the platypus finally managed to drown her assailant. In 2019 a female platypus, who was possibly carrying eggs stuck to her tail, was captured on video as she killed a rakali-Australia’s carnivorous native water rat, which can weigh more than two pounds and has nasty stabbing incisors-after it attacked her. Although females lack spurs, weigh only two pounds, and like all adult platypuses have no teeth, they can be tough customers, too. The fact that only males have them suggests that they are used in combat with other males during territorial and reproductive disputes. The platypus spur is almost an inch long and wickedly pointed and curved, resembling a much-thickened rattlesnake fang. Fifteen years later he was still experiencing stiffness and discomfort in the affected hand. Keith Payne, a recipient of the Victoria Cross (the nation’s highest military award), has said that being stung by a platypus was worse than being struck by shrapnel. And while a human fatality is yet to be recorded, the experience of being stung can be excruciating. Although they rarely rate a mention among Australia’s venomous creatures, their toxin-delivered by a spur on their back ankles-is so deadly that it can kill a rabbit in just ninety seconds. But there is far more to these anomalous animals than that. Platypuses, famously, are mammals that have ducklike bills and lay eggs. So he traveled to Australia, and this charming, informative book is the result. Freeze-drying leaves animals looking remarkably lifelike (unlike taxidermy, which can distort them), and the experience of handling such an exhibit left Ashby thirsting to see an actual, living platypus. Ashby, the assistant director of the University Museum of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, first became enamored of the platypus while examining a freeze-dried specimen held in the collections under his care. Platypus Matters is Jack Ashby’s paean to a creature that he proclaims to be his favorite.
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