Last summer’s catastrophic bushfires have caused platypus populations in south-eastern Australia to decline by up to 18 per cent, bolstering calls to have the species’ national conservation status changed to ‘vulnerable’.
Senior wildlife ecologist Josh Griffiths and his colleagues had been undertaking widespread surveys at 142 sites, including remote forests and farmland, throughout eastern Victoria and southern New South Wales before the fires to gather data on the elusive monotreme.This meant they had robust pre-fire data and were able to make this comparison: of the fire-affected sites, platypuses were detected in 40 of 48 sites before the fires. After the fires, platypuses were detected at just 33 sites.
But after the fire they suffer from “blackwater” events, when flooding washes organic material into waterways, and a shortage of food, including the freshwater shrimp and crayfish they eat. Platypuses are mostly active at night, but researchers did occasionally see them in the rivers while taking water samples or doing habitat assessment.
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