A botanist was admiring a myrtle shrub in bloom in an obscure state forest just west of Gympie in Queensland when his companion uttered 10 words that can rarely have been heard before – at least in English.
“I was just looking at a Gossia bidwillii, in flower and Darren calls out,” Elliot Bowerman said.
“He says, ‘there is a python with a platypus in its mouth’.”
Bowerman joined his fellow plant enthusiast Darren Williams and took some photographs of the roughly 2-metre long carpet python with its jaw firmly clasped upon the webbed-foot of an egg-laying mammal so unlike any other creature in the world that an 18th-century British scientist believed it must have been a hoax.
“So I walk over and then we look at it, take a few photos and within a minute we keep walking,” Bowerman said of the reptile v monotreme encounter.
“We didn’t want to disturb the snake.”
The male platypus was freshly killed, probably after what would have been a fierce struggle with the ambush predator.
“I imagine he put up quite a fight with those venomous spurs,” Bowerman said.
But, speaking to the 32-year-old former chef turned field botanist days after he captured the encounter, it seemed he was just as excited about another discovery he made on last Sunday’s exploration of Marys Creek State Forest.
Bowerman and Williams stumbled upon a stand of Croton lucens – a critically endangered plant found nowhere else.
“It’s a pretty benign-looking shrub,” Bowerman said. “But it’s endemic to the Gympie area, so that’s really special.”
The python-platypus scene is not the first time Bowerman has witnessed extraordinary animal behaviour while looking at plants.
In August last year the Sunshine Coast hinterland man and his partner were hiking through the mountains near Dorrigo, New South Wales, when they heard rustling in the bushes.
A carnivorous marsupial mouse, or antechinus, emerged eating a dead antechinus. It was the first time such opportunistic cannibalism was recorded among these critters – infamous for mating themselves to death – and scored Bowerman a co-authored paper in the journal Australian Mammalogy.
“It’s just getting out there,” Bowerman says of his knack for stumbling upon the extraordinary. “If you’re not out there, you won’t see it.”
