#wetas

Camel Crickets and the Dust Seeds of Parasitic Plants

A common way for plants to disperse their seeds is to entice animals to eat their seed-bearing fruits – a strategy known as endozoochory. Undigested seeds have the potential to travel long distances in the belly of an animal, and when they are finally deposited, a bit of fertilizer joins them. Discussions surrounding this method of seed dispersal usually have birds and mammals playing the…

(Just to be clear, that headline should have a hyphen in it. There is no evidence of giant wetas hunting and killing dinosaurs):

A gigantic insect absent from New Zealand forests for almost 200 years is making a comeback in the Bay of Islands. The wētāpunga, the largest of 11 species of giant wētā and one of the world's largest insects, emerged before the dinosaurs and outlived them by tens of millions of years. But by 1840 they had been all but wiped out by introduced predators, clinging to survival only on Te Hauturu-o-Toi/ Little Barrier Island in the Hauraki Gulf. Since 2012 Auckland Zoo has been breeding wētāpunga collected from Hauturu, with the aim of reintroducing these ancient insects to predator-free islands and reserves. Last Wednesday just over 300 juvenile wētāpunga were released onto two islands in the Bay of Islands, where community conservation group Project Island Song has been working for almost 20 years to restore native flora and fauna. Project Island Song's general manager Richard Robbins said the giant wētā was the eighth endangered species returned to the islands since 2012. "We're bringing the wētāpunga back because they're a really important part of the ecosystem, and they've been missing for about 200 years." Wētāpunga usually grew to about 35g - about the weight of a sparrow - but adult females could tip the scales at a whopping 70g.