STORY: These platypuses are waddling into what researchers hope is something like paradise.

::Platypuses

They’re at the world’s largest conservation center for the Australian duck-billed mammals.

::Dubbo, Australia

There are streams, waterfalls, and banks of earth to burrow in, custom-built to simulate a habitat threatened by humans – and extreme weather.

Research shows platypus numbers have taken a dramatic dive in recent decades with possibly half their number disappearing.

But Platypus Rescue HQ – hopes to reverse that trend.

:: THIS EARTH

To help these little guys, researchers need some answers to questions that came up after some of Australia’s worst wildfires in recent memory.

Dr. Phoebe Meagher from the Taronga Conservation Society Australia told Reuters the species’ habitat is now 40% smaller than it used to be.

:: Phoebe Meagher/Conservation Officer/Taronga Conservation Society Australia

“So in 2019, end of 2019, early 2020, we were hit with the Black Summer fires. This was also on the back of a drought that had just happened and platypus habitat was being lost at a really alarming rate. We were getting calls up and down the east coast asking Taronga if we could help rescue platypus that were being left without anywhere to swim and forage and live. We were able to rescue seven from southern Australia. But that’s all we had capacity for. So this made us realise that in fact the need to have facilities to rescue catchment scale levels of platypus populations was critical if we wanted to make an impact for the species.”

This research facility was built at Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo, some 240 miles from Sydney so that researchers can study platypuses in a natural-like setting because we don’t know as much about the way they live as we should.

::Dr Alisa Wallace/Senior Veterinarian/Wildlife Hospital/Taronga Western Plains Zoo

“We really don’t understand a whole lot about their biology and the things that drive them to breed or not breed and how they might be impacted by changes in water temperature or air temperature, changes in water conditions.”

The zoo hopes to breed platypuses for release back into the wild.

To make that happen, four of them were tested and quarantined for 30 days before being released into the HQ as part of a pioneering batch.

“In the short term, we would love to see some puggles or some baby platypus in the facility and understand what led to that reproductive success. In the long term, we want to have a really defined list of triggers that we can follow and other conservation organisations can follow in a drought or in a bushfire of how to go in, how to rescue a platypus population, how to transport them back to a facility and then look after them as an insurance population until that location is ready for those animals to be reintroduced to. I think this facility will allow us to not only save species in the immediate threats of climate change, but also in the long term, be able to repopulate those populations.”

The facility was set up after ten of the animals were successfully reintroduced into the country’s oldest national park south of Sydney last year, where they hadn’t been seen in half a century.