From ABC News (14/2/24)…
Oldest-known wild platypus gives new insights into longevity of enigmatic Australian species
Gemma Snowball didn’t make too much of the tag on the platypus pulled from a Melbourne creek last autumn.
Melbourne Water had been backing surveys of the city’s platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) populations since the 1990s so a tag was not unusual.
Stamped “01F6-03FF”, all the zoologists for Ecology Australia knew was the male had been captured before.
“I didn’t know the significance of the platypus age until a few days after when checking the data and talking to other biologists,” she said.
“I was quite shocked and excited when I found out.”
The tag dated all the way back to late 2000 when the male specimen from Monbulk Creek, one of 10 distinct Melbourne platypus populations, was estimated to be just over a year old.
