The Giant Weta, fool. There’s reports coming in it’s the largest bug on earth. Well, it does look rather large chomping on a carrot.
And apparently, people all over the world are freaking out over this photo of said Weta happily munching on said carrot. It’s cute, isn’t it?
Yet, irrationally, my daughter is praying that they, meaning Giant Wetas, will not infest Maryland anytime soon, although she does love bugs. It’s just that she’s creeped out because she had a dream about Wetas before she even discovered their actual existence. Only in her dream, they were bigger and eating people instead of carrots, which is impossible, of course, because they’re vegetarians, and no matter how large they get, we can assume and hope that they will remain vegetarians.
Even weirder than my daughter’s precognitive Weta dream, was her friend Caitlin’s dream, in which a banana and an orange chased her down the street. Although I’d rather be chased by runaway fruit than giant Giant Wetas.
Doctor Bugs and the Weight of Wetas
Anyway, this particularl Weta was captured and held in far away New Zealand’s Little Barrier Island by Mark Moffett, an entomologist, who refers to himself as Doctor Bugs. An article on MSN’s photoblog had this to say:
This particular species of the cricketlike creature — known as a giant weta or wetapunga to the Maori, and as Deinacrida heteracantha to scientists — is found only in protected areas such as New Zealand’s Little Barrier Island. That’s where Mark (“Doctor Bugs”) Moffett, an entomologist and explorer at the Smithsonian Institution, found the specimen after two nights of searching.
“The giant weta is the largest insect in the world, and this is the biggest one ever found,” Britain’s Daily Mail quoted Moffett as saying. “She weighs the equivalent to three mice. … 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.”
But is it really the largest insect in the world? And isn’t it interesting that Doctor Bugs calculates the weight of insects in mice? I wonder how many mice I weigh. It seems a bit unscientific. After all, don’t some mice weigh more than other mice?
Anyway, here’s more on the Giant Weta of the day, including a couple of creature photos – I’m not sure what they are – that make the weta look as scary as a stuffed panda, comparatively speaking.