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
But generally it's around the two to three minute mark that they'll be down and then they'll kind of pop up to the surface and eat any of the bugs that they've found.
So yeah, essentially they're not relying on their eyes or their ears when they're underwater.
So their bill is incredibly sensitive.
It's got electroreceptors and mechanoreceptors, which essentially means like once they dive under the water, they're detecting all those electrical signals that any little water bugs, any freshwater shrimp or worms are giving off.
And that's kind of guiding them to their position in the river, like down in all the mud.
And so, yeah, they're able to just
dive down, detect those signals, find their prey, and then they'll come back up to the surface where they'll eat their prey.
Is there metal in their bill?
No, no.
Yeah, super sensitive.
They're called electron mechanoreceptors.
They've got about 50,000 of them in the bill.
So it's highly sensitive to just any movement or electrical impulses that are happening in the waterway.
Is it a beak?
So a lot of people are also shocked when they see a platypus because it's called a duck bill platypus.
So people have this perception that the bill is going to be similar to what we would expect from a duck's beak.
So quite hard.
The bill is actually very soft on a platypus.
It's
Almost like malleable, like you can bend it.
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