Platypus Poisons
AN Australian amateur fisherman, Gordon Shawyer, aged 35, has just met with one of the world’s most unusual accidents. He was poisoned by a platypus. Fishing in a river near Goulburn, in the southern part of the State of New South Wales, Mr Shawyer hooked what he thought was an eel, but it turned out to be a platypus, the rare, furred, duckbilled, egg-laying mammal which is peculiar to Australia and completely protected there.
The platypus, normally one of the shyest creatures, did not behave in its usual fashion. It attacked Mr Shawyer, slashing his arms with the spurs on its webbed hind feet and injecting him with a poison which kept him in hospital for two days. Commenting on the incident the Curator of Mammals at the Australian Museum in Sydney, Mr B. Marlow, said the male platypus has spurs on the ankles of its hind legs. These spurs secrete poison only just before and during the mating season. For the rest of the year they are harmless and the platypus is timid and shy, \ but, at the mating season the little animal gains courage as well as poison and can be
Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP19660205.2.55
Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka
Press, Volume CV, Issue 30977, 5 February 1966, Page 5
Word count
Tapeke kupu
195Platypus Poisons Press, Volume CV, Issue 30977, 5 February 1966, Page 5
Using this item
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
Stuff Ltd is the copyright owner for the Press. You can reproduce in-copyright material from this newspaper for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This newspaper is not available for commercial use without the consent of Stuff Ltd. For advice on reproduction of out-of-copyright material from this newspaper, please refer to the Copyright guide.
Acknowledgements
Ngā mihi
This newspaper was digitised in partnership with Christchurch City Libraries.
Log in