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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

The platypus is one of Australia’s most iconic and intriguing animals.

But like so much of our natural wildlife it’s been under threat, first from our destruction of the environment and now from climate change.

Today, writer for The Monthly James Bradley on what makes the platypus so special and whether we’re at risk of a future without them.

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RUBY:

James, could you start by telling me what a platypus is?

JAMES

A platypus is a monotreme, And they're very strange animals that are very famously They've got that very odd mixture of characteristics. The duck’s bill, the webbed feet, the fur.

Archival Tape -- David Attenborough

The females had shelled eggs in their oviduct waiting to be laid. So to that extent, the platypus was like a reptile.

JAMES

Which meant that early, early naturalists didn't actually believe they were real.

Archival Tape -- David Attenborough

When in 1799 a dried body of a creature arrived from Australia that had the beak of a duck, the fur of a rabbit, and for webbed feet, you can hardly blame a man of science for viewing it with some scepticism.

JAMES

For a long time there's a kind of debate about whether this was just a fraud.and it was a debate about what kind of animal it was and eventually established that it was a mammal.

Archival Tape -- David Attenborough

It had been sent from the newly established colony in NSWa nd Dr Shaw of the natural history of the department was understandably cautious,

JAMES

But it kind of goes more than that. They're they've got 10 sex chromosomes instead of two, which is what most mammals have got.

They don't really have the stomach. The gullet connects almost directly to their intestines. They're venomous. Only a very small number of mammals are venomous.

Archival Tape -- David Attenborough

Its most obvious anomaly, its beak, is not, in fact very birdlike. It's soft and rubbery and covered in tiny sensory paws

JAMES

And that bill that that funny ducks, bill they’ve got.There's some evidence to suggest that it's actually used as a kind of electro receptor. So when they're down in the water, they move it from side to side. And we've seen film of one underwater or seen one underwater. You'll see the way they move their head from side to side. And that's because the eyes and the ears are closed underwater. So they can't really see or hear, but they think what they're doing is they're actually detecting minute changes of electricity in the environment, which allows them to sense their prey underwater.

Archival Tape -- David Attenborough

When you watch a platypus underwater, swimming energetically along the riverbed, waving its beak from side to side, it ought to put you in mind not of a duck grubbing around in the mud of the river bottom, but of a human treasure hunter walking over an archaeological site waving his electronic metal detector.

JAMES

So they're very, very strange animals.

RUBY

Hmm. Strange, but also very cute.

JAMES

They are very cute and they're very I mean, they're very beautiful. There's something wonderful about seeing them because it feels so. Perhaps I'm speaking as a city person, but it seems so unusual and kind of magical to actually see one.

RUBY

Mmm, it’s a rare thing to see a platypus in the wild, but how rare is it? What do we know about how the platypus population has been affected over the last decade or two by things like pests and drought and pollution? How many platypuses are still around?

JAMES

Look, so the scientists I was talking to for this story, that was one of the things they were trying to w ork out. because we don't have very good data about platypuses, we don't have very good data about where they used to be, how many there used to be, you know, what they're kind of historical range was.

And so one of the things they wanted to do was to work out that you can't you can't tell what's happening to them now unless we have some sense of how they used to be. And I was talking to a scientist called Dr. Tenille Hawk, who's at UNSW.

Archival Tape -- Dr. Tenille Hawk

I've been researching Platypus for the past five years as part of my PhD and then sort of continuing that work ever since, mainly looking at the impact of dams, historical declines, and then also trying to put together a bit of a national risk assessment for platypus.

JAMES

and she did this absolutely fascinating study. So what she did was she went and did kind of like data journalism.

Archival Tape -- Dr. Tenille Hawk

So we went through a lot of historic newspaper articles and journals to try and, you know, pull out any that mention platypuses or any of that mentioned platypus abundances.

JAMES

They kind of tracked the sightings over time and saw how they changed and how they'd altered over time. They found that they've lost about a quarter of their range since 1990, which is an area of about the size of Victoria.

But what came out of this process that was really fascinating to me was it wasn't just that they'd lost range, they'd lost abundance on a massive scale.

Archival Tape -- Dr. Tenille Hawk

One in particular was from the Princes Bridge in Melbourne on the Yarra River, which is right in the CBD, and a place I think it was 1908. They captured twenty two platypus there in one day, which just seems crazy now because obviously it's so urbanised and platypus aren't found there anymore.

JAMES

When you talk to Tenille, which she says is what happens is when you start reading these records, you realise that there was so many more platypuses in the past.

Archival Tape -- Dr. Tenille Hawk

So evidence like that was quite alarming given that these days people will see one or two platypus and take that as a unique experience.

JAMES

So what that suggests is that what we've got with the platypuses is what the Canadian marine scientist Daniel Pauly calls a shifting baseline. So we have a kind of forgetting of the past is kind of shifting our sense of what is normal.

So we've moved from a situation where platypuses were extremely abundant to where they're not particularly abundant. And we've just it happen gradually. So we haven't kind of noticed that attrition over time.

RUBY:

Mm hmm. And James, what is the biggest threat to the platypus now?

JAMES

Look, one of the things that came out of the research that the scientists I was talking to were doing is that the problem for the platypus is that there isn't just one threat.

What there are is there's a whole range of threats. You know, there are threats of fire. Of drought, of increased flooding, of disturbance of waterways, you know, all of these things, and it's not that any one of them, it's an increasingly what we're beginning to see is a convergence of these things.

So they start accelerating each other, yet these kind of synergies between threats happening. So it's not just that there's a threat to them is that there's lots and lots of threats and they start intersecting and there's this kind of sense that they're just, you know, like lots of these kind of natural systems, they could probably survive one of these things, but they can't survive all of them at once.

RUBY:

We'll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

James, we’re talking about the dwindling platypus population and the reasons for that. What are scientists looking at as they try and determine what exactly is going on?

JAMES:

So I spoke in the course of doing the research for the article to a fantastic scientist Dr. Gilad Bino. And he has been doing research on platypuses for years.

Archival Tape -- Dr. Gilad Bino

The first one that I saw, it was a miserable night. It was pouring. We're cooped up in our car waiting to check nets. So we go we have these five minutes that we check every three hours throughout the night. And so that's that's like just gruelling.. And I remember the first one we caught was a female juvenile. So she was absolutely tiny, adorable, so cute. It was amazing. And you know I haven’t stopped since.

JAMES:

After the huge fires across the summer of 2019, 2020, they wanted to go and look at what effect that it had on platypus populations.

Archival Tape -- Dr. Gilad Bino

Last year, much of New South Wales was experiencing a severe drought and then the fires hit. And so we wanted to really have a look, a close look at the impacts of that kind of combination.

JAMES:

So they went up to a series of sites in the catchments of the Manning and Hastings River up near Taree,

Archival Tape -- Dr. Gilad Bino out on site

JAMES:

And they chose a series of sites there. And those sites, some of them were sites where the fires had not burned through so unaffected by fire. Some of them were sites that have been kind of indirectly affected by fires.

So although the area itself would not burned, ash and run off from the fires had washed into that section of the river and affected it. And what they found was that the populations seemed to be OK in the areas which had only been indirectly affected, but where they'd been fire, There were very few platypuses.

Archival Tape -- Dr. Gilad Bino

And what we came across was really obvious where on Dingo Creek that got burnt down were hardly any platypuses. Very, very low numbers, just a handful.

JAMES:

In the areas where they've been, where they'd been burned and the fires had destroyed all of the vegetation on the along the banks of the rivers, and, you know, that affects the platypuses in various ways that lose their shading. They lose all of the food that drops out of the trees because they get lots of invertebrate larvae that kind of drop out insect larvae that drop out of the trees.

RUBY:

So James, what is all of this telling us about the future for platypuses in Australia? If the population is dwindling - how worried should we be?

JAMES:

Yeah, I mean, his research is telling us that, you know, the platypus is in a difficult place. Its numbers are going to continue to decline if action is not taken. Some of the scenarios I mean, Dr Bino and his and his colleagues have done some research around kind of projections over the next 50 years. And some of the scenarios are really very bad. I mean, they might lose up to kind of half their range in the next 50 years.

You now what that means is that we're looking at, you know, not the extinction of the platypus, but lots of local extinctions. They'll just disappear from lots of areas unless we start trying to change the way we do things like managing water and things like that as well.

So, you know, what the researchers are saying to us is that the future for the platypus is difficult.

Archival Tape -- Dr. Gilad Bino

I think it's really important to get the platypus listed as vulnerable. I think the data that we analysed indicates that the species is vulnerable, it's been undergoing declines and we think it meets the criteria. And so I think that that, you know, to the platypus deserves our conservation in the coming future.

JAMES:

A lot of this research has been fed into a, into a submission to the Environment Department because what they're trying to do is to get the Platypus listed as a threatened species at a federal level.

That is the really important process for a whole range of reasons.

So many of the threats that the platypus faces are actually things that kind of extend over state borders. So there are things about water management. They're about weirs. They're about, you know, environmental flows, and they're about things like climate action.

We're at a point where if we do the right thing at this point, we can actually help it, we're not kind of past the point of no return. We haven't passed a kind of tipping point with it. And we know what we need to do to help it.

RUBY:

Mmm. And what would it say about us if we did allow a creature as unique and as Australian as the platypus to disappear?

JAMES:

Look, I mean, the loss of the platypus is one of those things that. Seems very difficult to countenance, it's one of those very iconic, extremely charismatic kind of species

Certainly the kind of settler culture in Australia has placed it very much at a kind of centre of our idea of The land. You know, I mean, it's on our money, we used it as a, as a mascot. And there is something both kind of shocking, I think, and telling about the idea that something that we see as so iconic might actually be a victim of the society that's celebrating it.

RUBY:

Mm hmm. James, thank you so much for talking to me about the platypus

JAMES:

Thank you for having me.

RUBY:

The Monthly is Australia’s leading magazine covering politics, society and culture.

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Also in the news today…

Queensland Liberal MP Andrew Laming (Lamb-ING) will quit politics at the next election, after a Brisbane woman accused him of taking a photo of her underwear while she was bending down at work in 2019.

Laming initially said he would stand aside and undertake counselling in response to the allegations.

And one new case of Covid-19 was recorded in Queensland yesterday, as authorities attempt to control a new outbreak.

The Queensland government originally claimed positive Covid-19 case had held a large house party while awaiting test results, but police now say that was false and no offence was committed.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.

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