Cody Stylianou thought he saw a huge trout. But, skimming just below the surface, it moved differently than a fish.
The creature surfaced and, astonished, the Victorian fisherman picked up his phone. A pink platypus swam in front of him.
Stylianou regularly fishes in the Gippsland spot, which he keeps secret to protect this rare animal. He thinks it might be the same one he saw years ago, just older and bigger.
“The beak and legs are obviously pink,” he says. “When he went a little further into the sunny areas, he was easy to follow underwater, which is how I got so many videos of him surfacing.”
Stylianou was on his first trout fishing trip of the season in September when he spotted the platypus, which he nicknamed “Pinky.” He watched it feed at the top of the tannin-stained river for about 15 minutes.
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“I’ve seen other platypuses in the same river system, just normal colored platypuses,” he said. “Probably five to eight of them over the years, from memory. Normally, they just pop up to the surface of the water and then disappear once they see me.”
After Stylinaou shared images of the monotreme, online commenters speculated that it could have been a rare albino platypus. But biologist Jeff Williams says its color is simply lighter than you might expect.
“The color of platypus varies a lot,” says the director of the Australian Platypus Conservancy. “And this one is at the extreme end of mild cases. It’s not one that we think should be added to the list of albinos and leucistics.”
Just as humans have different colored hair or skin pigments, platypuses also come in different variations, Williams says. He said the platypus captured on video was “unusual but not exceptional”.
“What I saw and what every other platypus specialist has observed is that the color variation is very much within the type of color variation that you would expect,” he says.
“Let’s put it this way, it’s cute, but it’s not a breakthrough… We think it’s just one of the extreme ends. Every once in a while you’ll have a genetic abnormality that will just cause things to happen, just like it does with some humans, having more freckles and so on.”
“It’s somewhat unusual, but nothing to be particularly excited about, we fear.”
The platypus is listed as near threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. There has also been a decline in Victorian populations, making them more vulnerable, says Williams.
“Platypuses were in significant decline until around the 1990s, when the full impact of European colonization on our waterways became clear,” he says.
“We’ve basically ruined the flow of every river we have. We’ve destroyed the native vegetation along most of our waterways and, unsurprisingly, that’s put a lot of pressure on the platypus population.”
Replanting programs along waterways and consideration of environmental impacts near rivers have begun to help the population return.
“We still have a way to go and we can’t rest on our laurels,” says Williams.
“But the good news at the moment is that most of the survey work done in the area suggests numbers coming back, certainly the number of sightings in some places where there was concern.”
