Understandably, my information did little to assuage my aunt’s fear and one of her last comments has stuck with me, “I just don’t know what to believe right now.” I couldn’t comment on the state of affairs and definitely didn’t want to comment on the validity of the contents of the video. All I could share were the number of ICU and non-ICU cases as reported in a schoolwide email the previous Friday. In effect, I am almost as close to insider information on the pandemic as my aunt.
Unfortunately for both my aunt and me, I am a newly minted fourth year medical student. My fiancée and I represent our extended family’s only personal connections to a hospital, so the question was well intentioned, but I felt poorly positioned to answer.
#DUCK BILLED PLATYPUS BABY GANGSTA FULL#
She is, however, like the rest of my family, quite good at converting fear and anxiety into analytical investigation, and I could see the hallmarks of that process in full swing in the texts we exchanged. In fact, until this month, her time spent on YouTube had been limited to forced viewings of makeup tutorials at the hands of my ten-year-old cousin. My aunt isn’t one for sharing opinions – political or otherwise – and much less one for trying to discuss video evidence. I haven’t stopped thinking about that conversation since it ended. With the video came my aunt’s difficult question to field, “How are things at your hospital?” One particularly embarrassing segment caught a channel red handed in redubbing footage of an Italian ICU as scenes from the front lines in NYC. The other half of the thirteen-minute montage highlighted contradictory footage from news outlets that instead showed long lines outside those same NYC and California hospitals. In it, a citizen journalist compiled footage of several hospitals, emphasizing the lack of queues to their front doors and how empty their waiting rooms appeared to be from outside. Last week, my aunt texted me a link to a YouTube video. Interestingly, the platypus is one of only two types of mammals (the other being the echidna) that lay eggs.įollow Joseph Castro on Twitter. The male will then insert his penis, which is hidden in his cloaca, into the female's cloaca for fertilization - this process can take up to 10 minutes, Thomas said.Īfter mating, the female will ignore all other mating attempts during that breeding season, and the male may go on to find other females to mate with. To copulate, the male will climb partially on to the female's back, and curl his tail under her abdomen to bring their respective cloaca (waste and reproductive orifice) close together. They will also engage in other aquatic courtship activities, such as diving, rolling sideways together and swimming near each other, sometimes for a few days before finally mating. "They will then swim in a circle," Thomas said. Until that point, she may hang out in the same area and feeding pond as the male, but won't allow him to make physical contact with her.Īfter the female has decided to accept her potential mate, she will allow him to bite on her tail and she will respond by biting on his tail. Males will try to court females by biting on the female's tail, but the female will flee if she's not ready. Females don't appear to be picky with their choice of mates, and probably assume that the male in their area is the biggest and strongest, Thomas said, adding that the female in the Healesville Sanctuary's captive breeding program will court and mate with any male presented to her.Īdult platypus pairs engage in a courtship ritualthat lasts several weeks and takes place up to six weeks before mating occurs.
Little is known about what drives sexual selection in platypuses.
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