Text Transcription
A series of Tweets, each a reply to the previous.
- ABC News @ABC: Scientists have discovered a giant new species of stick insect in Australia, which is over 15 inches long and researchers say may be the heaviest insect in the country. [With a picture of a brown stick insect among some green leaves.]
- mary @theoceanblooms: can I ask a question: how does something like this go undiscovered until now
- soul nate @MNateShyamalan: Entomologist here πββοΈπ€π Great question! It may seem surprising that the scientific community could miss an entire bug species after all this time, especially when it's THIS big. The answer might surprise you more π Let's dive in π𧡠(1/?)
- soul nate @MNateShyamalan: he look like stick (2/2)
I don't know the specifics of this particular insect's origin story, but for a surprising number of insects & arthropods, the answer can be summarized as "nobody bothered to look closely enough".
Sometimes that's a literal fact -- the critter is so well disguised, lives in a remote or hard to reach location, or is so uncommon that nobody's ever noticed it before. But with surprising frequency, it's a case where previously undiscovered species have been right under our noses (or feet or rocks in our suburban yards) this whole time and we simply did not realize it. It's not that we don't notice them, just that nobody's ever taken the time to really study them enough to spot the differences from one closely related species to the next so we simply assumed they're all the same.
For example, there are species of beetles that about the only reliable way to tell them apart is to count the hairs on their butt when they are larvae. As adults, they are nearly indistinguishable. Now imagine that nobody ever took the time to study larval butt hair.I guess what I'm saying is, we need more funding for bug butt hair and general bug butt hair awareness, because it's a thing.
Without going into what βspeciesβ means exactly - because I know thatβs complicated - can you explain why those beetles are different species despite being nearly identical as adults? Is it just that they cannot interbreed?
I would love to tell people i count bug butt hair for a living. Where do i signup?
You could also look at insect penises for a living, a very common way of identifying species in various insect groups ;)
This work comes from unpaid internships or you are paying to get your masters.