Where are the best platypus exhibits?

Sim said:
Another vote for Healesville Sanctuary.

Hang around the Platapussary when it's quiet (during the bird show is a good start - most people will be elsewhere).
Click to expand...

Easily the best I've seen (small sample, but it's brilliant). Why the outdoor "palace of marbles" was built 20 years later is a complete mystery to me.
 
reduakari said:
Easily the best I've seen (small sample, but it's brilliant). Why the outdoor "palace of marbles" was built 20 years later is a complete mystery to me.
Click to expand...

To accommodate the growing numbers and have a few more exhibits for breeding. I understand it is not attractive (to Zoochatters, I would imagine that the general public don't really care) but is an effective exhibit and has seen breeding recently.
 
Shirokuma said:
Would it be problematic to transport them even within Australia? (I get that it's a big place).
Click to expand...

I'm just taking a guess here but they don't breed regularly and I think most of the ones in captivity would have come from the wild (rescued as well as caught). It would make sense that if any zoos held them then it would be the ones within platypus range.
 
nrg800 said:
Brisbane Forest Park - 1992 to Present
Bronx Zoo - 1947 to 1958
Budapest Zoo - 1913 to 1917
Fleay's Fauna Park - 1952 - Present
Australian Reptile Park - 1968 - Present
Healsville - 1933 - Present
Lone Pine - 1972 to 1988
Melboune Zoo - 1937 to Present
Sydney Aquarium - 1997 to Present
Taronga Zoo - 1934 to Present

According to Australian Mammals: Biology and Captive Management.
Click to expand...


Do you know if Taronga, Healesville and Melbourne have had platypus continuously in the time that they've held them. I assume in the first few years they would have been an on and off again display.
 
PAT said:
That could be to do with the fact that platypus only live along the eastern coast of Australia. Adelaide and Perth are both outside this range.
Click to expand...

I live a long way from the coast and have seen them in the Murray River near me. They are a long way down the west flowing rivers as well.
 
Monty said:
I live a long way from the coast and have seen them in the Murray River near me. They are a long way down the west flowing rivers as well.
Click to expand...

the "eastern coast" doesn't refer to the actual coastline, it refers to the area down the eastern side of the country. Have a look at a distribution map for platypus and you'll see what PAT means.
 
reduakari said:
Easily the best I've seen (small sample, but it's brilliant). Why the outdoor "palace of marbles" was built 20 years later is a complete mystery to me.
Click to expand...
have a read of this (rather pretentious) 2005 article about the Platypusary: Platypusary, Healesville Sanctuary - Reviews - Arts - Entertainment
There are times when an architect's imagination should be instinctive and uninhibited - free as a roaming platypus.

At the new Healesville Sanctuary Platypusary, Cassandra Fahey has visualised a huge platypus egg in bright gold pipes. It has panels with leaf shapes inscribed, which cast shadows. It encloses a few ponds of water running like a native creek.

The project supplements an earlier display building for platypuses, designed by Greg Burgess.

Burgess' work is earthy, using materials of the land, sculptured and dark, even foreboding. It allows the viewer to get up close to the animals.

Fahey's work is open, colourful and built of highly polished steel. The buildings could not be more different.

Fahey first came to prominence when she depicted actress Pamela Anderson's head - in pixelated blue glass - on Sam Newman's house in Albert Park. It was a simple, graphical work of pop art architecture.

This building shows she works just as adroitly in three dimensions. A curved steel frame wanders over the site, an ovoid golden frame that is organic in shape, but not in texture. Fahey took the most curious aspect of this animal - its egg-laying - and designed a building around it. More pop.

A decade or more ago, such a building would have proved difficult for an architect, but computers and software help to draw these shapes.

Architectural design is now partnered with digital production techniques: not the traditional pen, paper and eraser, but the swift click of a computer mouse. The interesting thing is, it matters not how the idea is produced. The result can be compelling and likeable both ways.

A platypus egg can be accurately anamorphised in a split second by a computer, then wire-framed as structure and documented. So it can be built as a platypus cage in a zoo with relative ease.

This Platypusary is a simple building. It is framed with sweeps of golden-coloured steel pipes. A pink veranda protects viewers as they try to spot the little monotremes and a handrail rolls around to act as an information stick.

Much of the golden frame is wired with cables that will protect the small duck-billed inhabitants from predators, so the overall effect is that of a skeleton, half skinned and half wired like a spider web.

On the ground, there is a kind of theatrical front-of-house series of ponds lined with sparkling glass marbles, and a backyard of breeding boxes.

These mechanistic breeding boxes look more like Eskies than a scientific apparatus, with robust PVC plumbing pipes that lead to two holes - one for males, the other for females - which poke from a rather clumsy wall. If things go as planned, the platypuses will start breeding here. Or they will simply breed out the back, in a log behind the building.

This building is built to show a whimsical animal. It is not wholly about the process of breeding, more of displaying how a platypus might go about such an operation.

That is why this structure is a golden, polished frame, designed for humans, not platypuses, but which, according to the architect, is intended to imply the dream world these small animals occupy as they get about their business.

That's the underlying hypothesis suggested by the architect. But I think Fahey is more comfortable with an unsophisticated architectural approach, which suggests an imaginative, rather than a scientific, mind at work.

Hers is not an architecture that labours under complicated theories and histories.

This is a naive, simple, modest idea - a semi-enclosed golden-framed structure in which platypuses may choose to breed in public view.
Click to expand...
 
Referring back to Shirokuma's posts about Adelaide not having platypus, Adelaide now owns Warrawong wildlife sanctuary which is home to platypus and is not too far from the city.
 
There has been a discussion of the lack of a decent zoo in Las Vegas in another thread and the supposed plan to open a branch facility of the Irwin's Australia Zoo came up. I found this article claiming that the Las Vegas Australia Zoo would have platypuses.

Australia Zoo in talks over Las Vegas crocodile oasis | News.com.au

Does anybody think that the Irwin family-Australia Zoo would actually have the pull to do that, assuming that the Las Vegas project ever got built, or is it just public relations bologna?
 
DavidBrown said:
There has been a discussion of the lack of a decent zoo in Las Vegas in another thread and the supposed plan to open a branch facility of the Irwin's Australia Zoo came up. I found this article claiming that the Las Vegas Australia Zoo would have platypuses.

Australia Zoo in talks over Las Vegas crocodile oasis | News.com.au

Does anybody think that the Irwin family-Australia Zoo would actually have the pull to do that, assuming that the Las Vegas project ever got built, or is it just public relations bologna?
Click to expand...
I don't think that article is actually claiming the proposed zoo would have platypus, it was just quoting the mayor naming Australian animals: "The zoo would be a limited zoo. It's an Australian zoo . . . we're just going to have wombats and platypuses and koalas and crocodiles." Given that Australia Zoo itself doesn't have platypus I wouldn't give it much credence.

Having said that, I suppose Steve could potentially have swung things to get platypus over there (he was very popular!) but Terri....well, not so much.
 
Since I'm European, I'm no expert, but I've seen the platypus on 2 out of 3 visits in Sydney Aquarium and when I was in Taronga, I did not see any platypusses at all, altho the exhibit in the platypus house was temporarely empty because of broken glass, so I had only half chances to begin with.

I visited Lone Pine, but since it was back in 2008, there wasn't a platypus back then. There is one now though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top