He spent two days searching for the creepy crawly which were thought to be extinct after Europeans brought rats to the island many years ago. American Mark, 53, said: "Three of us walked the trails of this small island for two nights scanning the vegetation for a giant weta. We spent many hours with no luck finding any at all, before we saw her up in a tree.
"The giant weta is the largest insect in the world, and this is the biggest one ever found. She enjoyed the carrot so much she seemed to ignore the fact she was resting on our hands and carried on munching away. She would have finished the carrot very quickly, but this is an extremely endangered species and we didn't want to risk indigestion.
"After she had chewed a little I took this picture and we put her right back where we found her." Mark, from Colorado, added: "We bug lovers hear a lot of people who think insects are inferior in some way because of their size, so it was great to see such a big insect. This became all the more amazing when we realised that this was the largest insect recorded."
9 comments:
This is going to take an anxiety pill to get over.
Biggest *living* insect. They used to be a lot bigger.
Wow, so cool! I hope they prosper then I can have one as a pet. It's like a mini alien.
What a lovely critter...
It's actually kind of cute.
Holy frackin' spit!
It may be the largest by weight, but I've seen stick insects that were bigger. On vacation in Mexico I found one that was 13 inches from tip to tail. I desperately wanted to take it (I had to create an insect collection the next school year in biology class) but it hissed at me and frightened me off.
No you haven't seen stick insects that were bigger. Longer maybe, but not bigger. Saying a stick insect is bigger than that thing is like saying Zoe Ball is bigger than Bella Emberg.
Bigger is about overall size, volume if you like.
Insects can only get to a certain volume given the size of their breathing apparatus (their spiracles). So sadly we're not going to see 50' tall ants anytime soon. Though it's really rather impressive and I'd happily feed it carrots, if it fell on me in the middle of the night I fear it'd be even more endangered.
PS: Arbroath : I've been on holiday for a week, looking forward to vegging out on excessive number of WTFs from yourself. I'll be expecting jesus to have appeared on a Weta in the next few pages.
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