‘We’ve never seen a platypus lay an egg’: sniffer dogs to aid researchers by detecting occupied burrows

Six-year-old kelpie cross is leading program designed to track elusive monotreme and study how they raise young

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Zoos Victoria is training sniffer dogs to detect live platypus in their burrows as part of a research project to determine how the monotremes look after their young.

The dogs were taught to recognise the odour of a platypus using scent-capturing polymer tubes which absorbed the smell of platypus sleeping in their nest boxes at Healesville Sanctuary. The tubes were then placed in the field for dogs to find.