How do you get rats off an island? My grandmother showed me…
Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)
#22I'm not sure why, but this brought a tear to my eye. Those insects are beautiful in their own way.
Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)
#23Are there any updates to this story? How is the de-ratification going? A few searches did not turn up anything that seemed like a useful update.
Here's a slightly more recent article from August 2012: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/2012/08/2...
It says that they've established a captive population of giant stick insects on Lord Howe, and they were planning to start eradicating rodents this year:
"The plan is to eradicate the rats and mice from conservation areas on Lord Howe Island in 2015, and then reintroduce the captive-bred stick insects, and their natural predators – a sub-species of boobook owl. This AU$9 million project has just been approved last month, as announced by Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke and NSW Environment Minister Robyn Parker. According to the government press release, they hope to wipe out more than 130,000 rodents using poison baits, some dropped by air, in allocated conservation areas. Special ‘arks’ will be used to protect native, endangered species until the rodents are gone."
Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)
#24The title of this article is base clickbait...
I disagree -- there's no question mark at the end of the title, nor any credulity-challening with "You won't believe what happened next!" I think this is just a well-written headline.
Or, to think of it another way: It's only clickbait if the headline is more interesting then the actual article. For this article, that's not the case at all.
Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)
#25I'm all for preserving endangered species and all, but frankly these insects scare the hell out of me and if I was anywhere close to one of them I may run away, screaming like a little girl.
I believe I'm not very exceptional a person thus I suspect they'll have difficulties convincing people to have this species reintroduced on any inhabited island.
Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)
#26I'm all for preserving endangered species and all, but frankly these insects scare the hell out of me and if I was anywhere close to one of them I may run away, screaming like a little girl. I believe I'm not very exceptional a person thus I suspect they'll have difficulties convincing people to have this species reintroduced on any inhabited island.
'screaming like a small child" perhaps is better.
Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)
#27How do you get rats off an island? My grandmother showed me…
For anyone who is confused, compto35 is referencing this chilling monologue from the James Bond film "Skyfall"
Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)
#28What I don't fully understand is, usually when scientists try to preserve rare species, there is a critical mass under which there isn't enough genetic diversity to preserve the species (I've seen ~30 quoted for some rare mammals). But in this case, just two individuals were able to start a viable population. Why are these insects different? I can only think of a couple reasons... - since these insects have a r-selec…
The main short-term issue with inbreeding is the emergence of recessive traits. If there are few deleterious recessive traits in the genome of a species, then inbreeding will not be a major problem.
In the long term, inbreeding is also a problem because it limits genetic diversity, which means anything with an adverse effect on one individual will adversely affect all individuals (the same problem as "monoculture" in software).
Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps, it is better to say "largely rat free." I grew up in eastern Alberta, and I certainly never saw a rat until I moved out of province as an adult.
I mean, I grew up in California, not even remotely rat free, and I think I've seen... three-ish... rats in my nearly 40 years? Besides pets or lab animals. Rats hide. Doesn't mean there aren't a fairly large number of them around.
If you've got a rat infestation in your building, it won't take long to figure it out even if you never see them. They have a tendency to cause a lot of damage and leave their shit all over the place.
Re: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years (2012)
#30I'm all for preserving endangered species and all, but frankly these insects scare the hell out of me and if I was anywhere close to one of them I may run away, screaming like a little girl. I believe I'm not very exceptional a person thus I suspect they'll have difficulties convincing people to have this species reintroduced on any inhabited island.
They're at least not as scary as spiders (which isn't saying much.) I'd say they somewhat resemble extremely large ants.
The article doesn't say much about their feeding behavior, but if they're anything like other walking sticks, they're herbivores with no defence mechanisms other than camouflage. Think butterflies, but without the wings.
I think the main reason I don't feel particularly creeped out by them, though, is that they have the sort of cartoonish physiology that I'd expect of a mostly-harmless Mario-game enemy.