Platypuses reintroduced to Australia’s oldest national park are breeding and appear to be on a good population trajectory with 20 known individuals now, scientists say.
For more than 50 years, the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus), a semiaquatic, egg-laying mammal, had been absent from Royal National Park, a protected area located just south of Sydney in the Australian state of New South Wales. A reintroduction program was initiated in 2023, led by Gilad Bino from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and a co-founder of the Platypus Conservation Initiative.
“It is a privilege to be part of bringing platypuses back to a part of their former range where they had been missing for generations,” Bino said in a statement.
In 2023, researchers first introduced a founding group of 10 platypuses to the Hacking River that flows through the national park. A second group of three animals followed in 2025. Each animal was fitted with a transmitter to allow scientists to monitor their survival, movements, and breeding.
In May 2026, researchers introduced four more platypuses sourced from healthy populations: two males they named Absinthe and Duckie, and two females they named Dawn and Hydra. At the same time, the researchers carried out extensive surveys and found 20 known individuals. More individuals could be present that were missed.
Visitors are also reporting platypus sightings in the park, especially around the river. “That public connection — people seeing platypuses back where they belong — is one of the most rewarding outcomes of this work,” Bino said.
The scientists have not only encountered platypuses from the original founding group, but also a new subadult, hatched in the park, showing the population is breeding.
“We now have multiple age classes in the park, evidence of breeding across consecutive seasons and animals interacting with the river system as a healthy platypus community should,” Tahneal Hawke, project co-lead also from UNSW, said in the statement. She added the population is “starting to stand on its own.”
According to UNSW, this is the first successful platypus translocation in New South Wales.
Josh Griffiths, an expert on the platypus with EnviroDNA, who was not involved in the reintroduction, told Mongabay by email that the population remains “very small and isolated,” and thus vulnerable to environmental disturbance and long-term genetic issues, but that it is “tracking in the right direction.”
Griffiths added the project “demonstrates the capacity of platypuses to adapt back to areas where they have disappeared if we can restore habitat to suitable condition.”
Banner image: A platypus swimming. Image by Charles J. Sharp via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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