Okay so let me tell you about the tree lobsters.
They’re these behemoth weird bugs, like crickets as big as your hand. They live in the trees and don’t do much, they just muck around trying to find food like every other peaceful species. When rats arrived on their little island they had a holocaust; they just weren’t equipped for it in any way. The islanders honestly didn’t seem to mind very much; they were kind of off putting creatures and did nobody any good in particular. Everyone thought they were extinct, oh well, I have work tomorrow and things on my mind.
Not the biologists. They heard a rumor that a little population might have hung on, way out on some godforsaken spire of rock out on the water that was too far away from the island for anyone to care about. They went out there, in bad weather, more than once, put genuine risk to their safety having to climb up like mountaineers up this massive sheer rock spike; eventually they realized they had to go at night, out on the water, and they kept at it until they actually found a few of the damn things alive, and brought them back to try to set up a little breeding population.
Most of the them died. No one really knew what to feed them but they managed to figure it out just barely in time. Out of 4 they brought back from the dwindling population, 2 died, leaving 2: 1 male and 1 female. To hear the scientists talk about it and how panicked they got about this being for real the last chance that these unique little creatures might have, that their whole lineage might live or die depending on what this little handful of people in the lab can figure out or how hard they try to make sure they get what they need to keep living, honestly gets me a little choked up thinking about it. Anyway, they’re still around, and producing eggs and little babies now.
To me – I am dead serious about this – this is part of what I love about humanity. For as much fucked up stuff as we do I do not know of any other species that would do something like this. The whole unique combination of caring enough to risk your safety and spend years of effort, a significant chunk of your one and only life, and this level of intelligence and talent and shared knowledge, all invested in some weird little beasts that can’t really do anyone any good at all. It’s just, oh shit, they’re in trouble, real bad trouble and we can help them so we have to.
Things go extinct all the time. Mother Nature doesn’t give a shit any more than Shell Oil does. But now these little guys have temporarily someone to look after them who really cares, for maybe the first time in their whole species’ lifetime.
At least as far as I know they are still around. They tried to introduce them back to the island, which is difficult, and which the island’s inhabitants may or may not want, but the lab still has a bunch of them. They’re still around for now.
Edit: Corrected some details
I had to go look that up too..
Thst spire of rock looks… when I was a kid, I fantasized about being a Sea King or or maybe a pirate… The only thing that was really fleshed out was the fortress. Complete with ballista and trebuchets.
Any how… that spire, is basically how I imagined the island to be.
Also, the bugs aren’t quite as ugly as lobster. Just saying.
I had at this point already looked up the creature and its wikipedia page, but after your comment I had to go look at the mountain. That’s certainly a mountain that breathes a certain vibe! I could see a romance novel being situated in a place like that.
Only if I get to keep my trebuchets.
A guy has to have a hobby….
Of course. Do you see a better way of keeping rival pirate groups from ransacking your clifftop castle?
Dang at first I thought this was another story that just happened to be very similar, because I had never heard of “tree lobsters” before, but I had heard of the Lord Howe Island stick insect. But nah, just alternate names for the same creature. Anyway, I loved this quote from their Wikipedia article:
They scaled 120 metres of grassy, low-angled slope, but found only crickets.
You just know whoever wrote that was thinking how clever it was.
They tried to introduce them back to the island (which the islanders sort of went WTF why), which I don’t think worked real well
This part doesn’t seem to be correct. For starters, there is no indigenous population on Lord Howe Island, so the “islanders” aren’t really a distinct population so much as Australians who just happen to live on the island.
There has been an ongoing effort to exterminate the rat population, which must be completed before they can go ahead with the reintroduction. This has worried some local residents because of fears the poisons etc. might harm children, pets, and native wildlife. In fact they had to remove a bunch of native birds from the wild to temporarily store them in captivity until the poison had broken down.
But as far as I can tell, the reintroduction of the species to the island is still planned, and is not particularly controversial.
Yeah, I was basing that part of the whole little edifice on one sentence out of this article which might have been facetious. I edited it and also made some other factual corrections after rereading the thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryococelus_australis?wprov=sfla1
Wikipedia article on these
bugsinsectsThanks for that write up!
Fascinating story, thrillingly written! I’d like to subscribe to Field Biologist Adventures, please.
So what do they eat?
Something that really trips me up is that the humans that do those incredible, heart warming things often carry the same motivations and beliefs as the monsters. The road to hell, after all, is paved with good intentions.
For instance, I’m seeing a lot of pallells in this story that align with the creation of Africanized honey bees.
I feel like the enraged reactions of the parisitologists is a bit toxic tbch
Like there’s a reason why those animals are so reviled, and it’s because those behaviors when replicated by humans are some of the most horrifically abusive things imagineable to do to other people.
Yeah that’s just how they evolved and it’s not like they can choose to behave non-parasitically, but getting mad at people for empathizing against it the same way they do when a raptor carries off a screaming bunny or a pack of tigers mauls a baby goat is kinda missing the entire point of how empathy works.
It’s not rational, it’s not their fault that this is how they survive and reproduce, but it’s not fair to get mad at people for having negative reactions to those behaviors just because you happen to think it’s neat for whatever reason.
Sure try to raise awareness for what you love, but naming a family of wasps that reproduce by basically stab r*ping other bugs, injecting them with eggs that hatch and begin eating their organs in order of least vital to most, giving them turbo aids in the process, and then exploding them when they’re ready to take flight for themselves, after a guy who vocally did not think highly of those creatures as an act of spite for daring to not have too high an opinion of stab r*ping things and eating them alive from the inside, is just a level of immaturity on par with the guy who documented the sexual behavior of penguins in ancient greek to avoid the lowly common folk having access to such vulgarity.
Right, they had me at hyena, lost me at parasites lol
Yeah, also this disgust and horror towards parasites is how we evolved. The Guinea worm is the extreme example of how bad it can get, but every parasite takes nutrients from us for no benefit to us, often causing discomfort in the process. Meanwhile we don’t feel that way towards predators because our response to predators is to get the fuck away, or to sympathize as we also prey. But disgust makes sense when the mechanism to defend yourself is to avoid letting it into your body.
What is this about penguin literature in ancient Greek?
Penguins are rapey, one of the first to study and record penguin activity didn’t think "unlearned"people were fit to read such “filth”.
Like… they got a point.
Also, any one got a link to parasite of the day?
Edit… think I found it:
I thought at first the name was a bit ambitious, as going back through its history it’s really been more of a monthly parasite. But then I got to 2010, and they really did do a parasite a day for that whole year. Impressive!
Leung’s deviantart page with the aforementioned parasite monster girls https://www.deviantart.com/the-episiarch/gallery
