![]() Anich’s hunch is that it helps camouflage the mostly nocturnal platypuses from nighttime predators that have UV vision, since, by absorbing some of the UV light, platypuses reflect less of it. What, if any, purpose this fluorescence may have remains a mystery. “Next time I’m out trapping, I’ll take a UV light with me and test it out.” “I’m curious to know myself now,” says Josh Griffiths, a wildlife ecologist with the environmental consulting company Cesar in Parkville, Australia, who has been working with platypuses for over a decade. It’s also likely that the living animals glow like their pelts, she says, as that’s been the case for all other known fluorescent mammals. Sure enough, it also glowed, the researchers report online October 15 in Mammalia.Īnich is confident that the glow isn’t an artifact of preservation, because several of the examined squirrel species and the echidna pelts didn’t fluoresce. To make sure the glow wasn’t something unusual about the Field Museum’s pelts, the team also examined a platypus specimen at the University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln. And they were incredibly, vividly fluorescent green and blue.” “So, we pulled the monotreme drawer, and we shined our light on the platypuses. “We were curious,” says Anich, of Northland College in Ashland, Wis. And it just so happened that the drawer of monotremes - an early branch of mammals that, today, is represented only by platypuses ( Ornithorhynchus anatinus) and echidnas - was the next one over from marsupials. After examining the museum’s preserved squirrel skins and finding that fluorescence occurred in at least three flying squirrel species, the team decided to examine pelts from marsupials too, as those were the only mammals previously known to possess fluorescent fur. ![]() A chance sighting of a fluorescent flying squirrel in the wild had led the researchers to the mammal collection at the Field Museum in Chicago. Platypuses’ dense, waterproof fur absorbs ultraviolet light and emits a blue-green glow, mammalogist Paula Spaeth Anich and colleagues discovered somewhat serendipitously. ![]() Now, researchers have found that this Australian oddity has another unexpected feature: It fluoresces under ultraviolet light. Between the electricity-sensing bill, venomous heel spurs and egg laying, the platypus was already one of the strangest mammals alive today ( SN: 5/8/08).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |