Double Debut: Healesville Sanctuary welcomes twin Platypus

A pair of baby platypus have emerged from their underground burrow at Healesville Sanctuary after approximately 133 days after hatching.

For the first time at the Sanctuary, a “burrow cam” was installed, providing keepers with 24 hour vision. This is when they discovered twins.

“I felt like I was the first one to ever witness something no one else had before,” Senior Keeper Jessica Thomas said.

“It was like a sneak peak through the nursery window at a maternity ward or a mum seeing an ultra sound of her baby for the very first time.”

After 13 year old mum Binarri and six year old dad Tarrabi were spotted courting late last year, Binarri had almost immediately begun nesting. The twins emerged within days of each other and are now fully independent from mum.

“Binarri is totally exhausted and looking like every new mum in the first six weeks post birth,” she said.

“She is eating more than half her body weight in food to recondition now that the twins are totally weaned.

They emerged more than half her size and she was feeding both of them just from her own milk supply.”

Healesville Sanctuary was the first in the world to breed this unique creature in captivity. In the 1940s,

Corrie, the first platypus ever bred in captivity, was hatched. Her birth made front-page news in London and New York. This is the Sanctuary’s first platypus birth in three years and the fifth time the Sanctuary has successfully bred twins. Healesville Sanctuary is still one of only two zoos in the world to have bred platypus and the twins are the Sanctuary’s 13th and 14th.

The twin boys will only be on display for the Labour Day long weekend (12-14 March) with special Keeper talks in the Platypus Tank at 10:30am and 2pm daily at the Sanctuary’s Platypus House.