The Fur Real Podcast with Mark A Kyle

What do you get when you combine a duck’s bill, a beaver-like tail, webbed feet, venomous spurs, egg-laying, and the ability to detect electricity? You get one of the most unusual animals on Earth—the platypus.In this episode, Mark talks with Australian platypus researcher Dr. Tahneal Hawke about the remarkable biology, behavior, and conservation of this one-of-a-kind mammal. They explore how platypuses hunt underwater with their eyes, ears, and nostrils closed, why males carry venomous spurs, and how an egg-laying mammal became one of evolution’s greatest surprises.Dr. Hawke also shares what it is like studying these elusive animals in the wild, the threats they face from habitat loss, drought, and changing waterways, and what researchers are learning about how to protect them.Funny, fascinating, and packed with “wait...what?” moments, this episode proves that when it comes to the platypus, nature clearly decided the usual rules did not apply.www.unsw.edu.au/research/platypus-conservation-intiative www.furrealpodcast.comig@platypus_ci ig@tahneal ig@thefurrealpodcast ig@markakylefb@ PLatypus Conservation Iniative fb@Mark A Kyletik tok @thefurrealpodcastSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What if intelligence isn’t what we’ve always assumed it is?In this episode, corvid researcher Kaeli Swift invites us to reconsider how intelligence is defined by exploring the inner lives of crows and their relatives. Drawing from her groundbreaking work on crow funerals—where crows gather silently around their dead to observe, learn, and assess danger—she reveals how these birds use memory, reasoning, and social awareness in ways that don’t fit traditional human benchmarks, yet are deeply sophisticated.From recognizing individual human faces to communicating risk across generations, crows demonstrate intelligence shaped by survival, community, and experience rather than language or tools. This conversation challenges the idea that intelligence must look human to be meaningful—and asks what we might learn if we paid closer attention to the forms of intelligence we’ve been overlooking all along.www.furrealpodcast.com blog corvidresarch.blogig@ corvidresearch ig@thefurrealpodcast ig@markakylefb@ corvidresearch fb@ mark a kyletiktok@ corvidresearch tik@ thefurrealpodcastSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.