Bing Platypus Quiz: 10 Questions on Australia’s Most Puzzling Mammal

Bing changes its homepage photo every day, and a large share of those images feature wildlife and wild places. The daily quiz that goes with the image tends to ask about whatever is pictured, so animals with headline-worthy traits make natural quiz material. The platypus might be the ultimate example: nearly every fact about it sounds like a trick question, which makes it perfect for multiple-choice formats where one option is true and the others merely sound plausible.

The animal also appears in general-knowledge and news-based quizzes, because it shows up in science headlines (glowing fur, genome studies) and in Australian conservation news. If you enjoy testing yourself on a different subject every day, our daily homepage quiz serves up a fresh 10-question set on a new topic each morning.

A platypus bill looks like a duck’s, but it feels and works nothing like one. It is soft, rubbery and covered in sensitive skin packed with receptors: roughly 40,000 electroreceptors plus tens of thousands of touch-sensitive mechanoreceptors.

When a platypus dives, folds of skin close over its eyes and ears, and its nostrils seal shut. Effectively blind and deaf underwater, it swings its bill from side to side across the riverbed. The electroreceptors pick up the tiny electric fields produced when a shrimp or insect larva moves its muscles, while the touch receptors register the pressure wave of that movement. Combining the two signals is thought to help the animal pinpoint how far away its prey is.

Food is tucked into cheek pouches during the dive and chewed at the surface. Hunting is hard work: a platypus may eat roughly a fifth of its own body weight every day, and nursing females need even more.

The platypus is a mammal that lays eggs, and that single fact powers more quiz questions than any other. Before laying, a female digs a long nesting burrow into a riverbank and plugs it with soil, which helps protect the nest from floods and predators. She usually lays one to three small, leathery eggs (two is most common) and incubates them for about 10 days, curling her body around them and holding them against her belly with her tail.

The hatchlings are tiny, hairless and blind. Here comes the second twist: their mother has mammary glands but no nipples. Milk seeps out through two patches of skin on her abdomen, and the young lap it up from her fur. They stay in the burrow for around three to four months before they start swimming outside it.

Two more facts that sometimes surface in quizzes: female platypuses have two ovaries but only the left one normally works, and baby platypuses are informally called “puggles,” a nickname also used for young echidnas. It isn’t an official scientific term, so treat it as a fun extra rather than a guaranteed answer.

The platypus is one of very few venomous mammals. Adult males have a sharp, hollow spur on the inside of each hind ankle, connected to a venom gland in the thigh. Females are born with small spur buds, but these drop off early in life.

Venom production rises sharply in the breeding season, which in Australia runs roughly from winter into spring. That timing strongly suggests the spurs are mainly for fighting rival males rather than for hunting or defense. For people, a spur strike isn’t known to be fatal, but it causes swelling and intense pain that can last for days or even weeks and responds poorly to ordinary painkillers. For small animals such as dogs, it can be deadly.

The short answer: the platypus is not officially endangered as a species, but scientists are increasingly worried about it. The IUCN moved it from Least Concern to Near Threatened in 2016, and two Australian states list it as threatened. Nationally, it still has no protection under Australia’s main environment law.

The pressures are well known. Dams and river regulation break up habitat and change water flows. Droughts, heatwaves and bushfires, all intensified by climate change, can leave platypuses stranded in shrinking pools. Land clearing, pollution, litter, foxes and dogs add to the toll, and enclosed “opera house” yabby traps drowned so many platypuses that several states have now banned them. Research led by the University of New South Wales has estimated that local populations have disappeared across a large part of the species’ historic range.

One of the biggest obstacles is simply counting them. Platypuses are shy and mostly active in the dark, so reliable population data is scarce. In 2026, researchers and the Australian Conservation Foundation stepped up calls for the federal government to fund Australia’s first national platypus survey, after a nomination to list the species under national law was not taken up for assessment. Conservation stories like this regularly make headlines, so if you like staying current, try our daily top news quiz on the latest U.S. and world events.

• “Egg-laying mammal” means monotreme. Don’t be tempted by “marsupial” just because the animal is Australian. Kangaroos and koalas are marsupials; platypuses and echidnas are monotremes.
• Separate the senses. Electroreception (platypus, sharks) is not echolocation (bats, dolphins).
• Venom belongs to adult males, delivered through spurs on the hind ankles.
• Remember the money. The platypus is on Australia’s 20-cent coin; the 1-dollar coin shows kangaroos.
• Watch the plural. “Platypuses” is the standard plural. “Platypi” is a common mistake, because the word comes from Greek, not Latin.
• Read Bing’s image notes. The description that accompanies Bing’s daily photo often contains the very detail a question is testing.