On the subject of platypus breeding - yes, they are extremely fussy and difficult breeders.
From this site, regarding Warrawong Sanctuary in South Australia
I visited Warrawong sanctuary and took a tour just a few years after their first breeding success - believe me, we heard ALL about it, they considered it a major coup. The sanctuary itself had had a turbulent history with neighbors and local government, some of it probably down to its director and founder John Walmsley, a highly passionate and extremely abrasive advocate for Australia’s native wildlife. Among other things, when the sanctuary was getting started, local hoons used to hoist feral cats over the sanctuary fence (cats are absolute death to native wildlife). Walmsley, a confirmed cat-hater, shot them all and made himself a catskin hat, which was a fairly controversial move as you can imagine.
However, nobody could say the dude didn’t work hard. According to him, they had been trying to breed platypuses almost from the beginning of the sanctuary’s history (1969) - so that makes over 20 years to get it right. Among the details I remember - it turns out male and female platypuses each need their own reservoir so they can keep out of each other’s way most of the time, and then the reservoirs need to have a small connection so they can get together at the appropriate time - there were details about the configuration and climate needed for the females to successfully nest too. Platypus breeding is a skilled art.
Because who’s going to pay for it, if they don’t get to go look?
Having basically grown up in several zoos, I know perfectly well that they’ll all be a lot happier if they could not have to deal with all those visitors cluttering up the place. Often, what visitors was is in direct conflict with the animals’ ideals- people want to see them, animals largely want to not be seen, for a start.
There are a lot of private people who have run seriously impressive breeding programs on their own land, you just don’t know they’re there. I’ve visited someone who had the best lemur breeding records in the UK, in a city terrace back garden. But you need some serious money and dedication to do that by yourself, with no money coming back from it.
Most zoos do, in fact, have popular non-rare animals (meerkats, anyone? Common as muck, but bring in the punters), but generally not ones that don’t breed in captivity well. Platypus don’t, at least in the sort of set-up most places could dedicate to them. Some of the Aussie places that do have them have pretty much diverted a natural stream through a pen, and they live in almost exactly the same conditions, on the same food, as they would fully wild. This is very hard to replicate outside of the country.
Oh, and I have seen both a captive playtpus, at Sydney Aquarium- on my first jet-lagged day in Australia, got lucky and came when it was awake, and spent several minutes watching it swimming through the tank; and a wild platypus, in Tasmania- from a disused bridge, over a stream just outside a national park (not half an hour’s walk away from what’s touted as the best platypus watching spot in Aus, where I spent a full day previously watching a river and getting excited by what turned out to be random rocks). I watched it for five minutes or more fishing quite close up without it noticing me.
They could call it “the tri-state area,” but my recollection of hearing advertising from this, uh, area, growing up is that it was generally called “The Tristate.” For whatever reason.
