DailyCelestialChallenge Tuesday: AnimalKingdom - The platypus.
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Hello dear friends of @steemchurch, following the challenge that I started yesterday at #celestialchallenge by @sirknight today, I want to tell you about a very peculiar animal: The platypus
Note: @sirknight started a contest and its daily topics are:
Sunday-Light
Monday-Darkness
Tuesday-AnimalKingdom
Wednesday-Structures
Thursday-ForcesInNature
Friday-LoveBeautyFreedom
Saturday-Agriculture
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The platypus is a species of semi-aquatic mammal endemic to eastern Australia and the island of Tasmania. We know very little about their life and reproduction so for that reason I decided today to share with you The life cycle of one of the strangest mammals that exist, is quite peculiar due to its unusual characteristics, bird and reptile, egg laying, poisonous, with snout shaped like a duck's beak, beaver's tail and otter's legs.
Although it looks small, it weighs approximately 60kg and measures between 40 and 60cm, with a tail of 30cm. It usually lives in rivers and feeds on small fish. He has an incredible ear to be oriented to perfection.
For its reproduction, the female tends to build a burrow by excavating a space of approximately 40cm deep and up to 6 meters long. At the far end, the eggs are placed on a nest, which is made up of leaves and aquatic weeds. Cover the entrance with soil using its tail and proceed to lay. The eggs that it lays tend to be two, of a fairly soft structure, they have two weeks of incubation. When the young are born, they get into a kind of fold of the skin, which works like a sack where milk is also deposited to feed them. The platypus has a long life expectancy that is around 30 years.
Due to its strange characteristics, it became a highly sought after animal for biological studies, as well as a lot of search for its skin, but it is currently protected throughout its range, even though it is not considered to be under immediate threat, despite the fact that captive breeding programs have had quite limited success, and that it is a species vulnerable to the effects of pollution.