Dr. Tahneal Hawke
speaker
648 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 23 Jun
Dr. Tahneal Hawke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Why they have it is it's really, we think, a male-male combat thing.
So the venom is like it doesn't impact platypuses as much as it impacts humans or, you know, that would probably be detrimental to their health.
longevity but we see that during the breeding season the venom production really spikes for males and you see them like you know they're aggressive you see them fighting in the water you know they've got scars on their tails from when they're kind of engaging in this combat when it comes to combat the males are well equipped for a knife fight and that's because they're you know they're fighting for resources they're fighting for females but
They're fighting for habitat.
And the reason why we think that this is to do with breeding and not like an anti-predator defense is because we don't see these spurs in the females.
So females are born with a residual spur, which is lost.
Yes.
So yeah, when we're in the field, we're steering clear of that.
Like I said, you know, it can be months of pain, it can cause muscle atrophy.
Normally, it's people like get spurred in the wrist or the hand, but your ability to use your hand could be
really compromised so yeah when we're in the field you know we're super careful with how we handle the animals we're assuming that any platypus we catch is a male until we prove 100% that it isn't but irrespective when we're handling them we're holding them by the tail with our hand kind of on like the back side so you know it's out of reach of the spur and it's like really the only safe way to handle them and make sure that you don't come into contact with those spurs
Not my direct colleagues, but I know some people that work at Taronga Zoo in Sydney.
I've heard their stories of being spurred.
One lady was spurred there.
I think she said it was more painful than delivering her twins.
Ugh.
And there are records of people, you know, who the issue that the public has is they'll see normally it's an injured platypus that's on land and they'll kind of go up and they'll try to help the animal without realizing about these spurs.
Because, you know, a lot of people don't know about platypus, let alone about their venom.
So they're trying to help the animal and they get stung and they soon realize the pain associated with it.
Yeah, for sure.
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