
Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides For 80 Years - MaysonL
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/02/24/147367644/six-legged-giant-finds-secret-hideaway-hides-for-80-years?sc=fb&cc=fp
======
petenixey
Respect to the little feller for making it out of that egg. Any animal that
starts life having to unglue their feet from the bottom of a vacuum-packed,
delivery case is a winner.

~~~
Historiopode
I would be curious about the details of such "unpacking". The apparent volume
ratio of the born insect over its egg's is quite stunning.

~~~
bh42222
I think the way it works for most most (maybe even all) insects is to use air
to blow themselves up much like a balloon to get out of the egg or cocoon.

~~~
michaelcampbell
where does this air come from; is the cocoon/egg not airtight?

~~~
bh42222
While an egg or cocoon might be airtight, it must also still remain air
permeable. Everything must be able to breathe. So while there might not be a
visible flow of air, like through an open window, oxygen and CO2 still make
their way in and out all the time.

Also initially the insect might break the egg/cocoon open without extra air,
just by simple mechanics, but once it's out it starts to pump air into itself.

------
ars
That's an awesome story!

Initially I didn't like the genetic bottleneck created by just having one pair
(i.e. that they should go back and get more now that they know how to care for
them, perhaps as a swap) - but then I realized the original source on the
island was probably a single individual, so they are all probably virtually
clones anyway.

Once they have enough they should sell some - tons of people would be
delighted to keep them as pets, and it would remove the risk of having them in
just one location.

~~~
cpeterso
> _Initially I didn't like the genetic bottleneck created by just having one
> pair (i.e. that they should go back and get more now that they know how to
> care for them, perhaps as a swap) - but then I realized the original source
> on the island was probably a single individual, so they are all probably
> virtually clones anyway._

That's probably a problem when trying to save any endangered species. Given
the challenges (and time investment) of animal husbandry, I'm surprised that
cloning of endangered series is not more common. Even if the clones are
genetically identical, at least they buy you some more time to save them.

~~~
TheSOB88
Clones are generally very fragile beings. They die soon. Also, they're not
that easy to make - a whole process has to be discovered for each species.
It's very, very time consuming and expensive.

------
juliano_q
This story gave me a weird feeling and reminded me of the Dodo
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo>). This animal was extincted by man only
83 years of it was discovered. I am glad we have will/technology enough today
to try to repair this kind of mistakes.

~~~
roel_v
I'm not sure why we should restore these species, just like this insect. What
is the driving force behind reintroducing them? Should we also reintroduce the
mammoth when we have the tech to do so? Why?

~~~
panacea
Wow. I'm honestly flabbergasted as to why you don't think preserving this
species (it isn't resurrecting mammoths) is worthwhile.

What do you consider worth preserving?

Does the fact that humans introduced rats into the ecosystem that wiped them
out count for anything to you?

(Are rats the invisible hand of the market or something?)

~~~
roel_v
Well, then why don't you tell why we _should_ preserver them rather than
downvoting me? And no I don't see why humans introducing rats matters. Is this
some sort of collective guilt, 'reparations' sort of thing? To whose benefit?
These insects don't know if there are 10 or 10 million of them, and they don't
know if when they die, they will be the last of their species. And if they
are, what does it matter? Is there moral superiority in having as many species
as possible? Why?

~~~
panacea
Firstly, I apologise for downvoting you. Unnecessary, and somewhat spiteful.

I'm guessing in advance that we're going to have to agree to disagree, or more
likely, this conversation will peter out unfinished, but I'll have a go at
explaining my position.

The Earth is a finite enclosed ecosystem to all intents and purposes. Humans
have existed for a small fraction of time compared to the entire life of the
planet. In a few short centuries, we've unified all ecosystems under the one
ubiquitous umbrella.

For scientific reasons, isolated species such as these should be preserved. To
study, inform and provide living examples of the diversity of life that
existed before the ubiquity of modern human civilisation eradicated so much.

The religious right in the US would like us to believe in Noah's Ark rather
than evolution. Creatures such as these... adapted in an isolated island to
grow fat and large, without competition from mammalian predators on connected
land-masses, shine a light on Darwinian evolution.

And from a purely 'awwww' perspective (and if you don't think that counts for
anything, you're a robot), these critters kept many to hundreds to hundreds-
of-thousands of years of generations going and survived in a single outcrop of
rock against all odds. Fucking evolutionary heroes if you ask me.

Sentimentality aside...

We're now the dominant life-form on earth. We're looking for microbial life
under two miles of ice in the Antarctic in Lake Vladivostok. We're sending
rovers to Mars looking for microbial life.

We've GOT A FUCKING ALIEN-LIKE SPECIES LIVING ON AN OCEAN OUTCROP HERE ON
EARTH.

A complex, beautiful, rare insect (did you watch the hatching vid?)... and you
wonder why it's worth keeping it around?

~~~
roel_v
"For scientific reasons, isolated species such as these should be preserved.
To study, inform and provide living examples of the diversity of life that
existed before the ubiquity of modern human civilisation eradicated so much."

These are two contradictory statements in one statement. Either we preserve,
in which case there is no 'before' in your sentence (because there is no
eradication), or we don't, and we document what once existed. I'll interpret
your intent as being 'we should preserve all species so that we can study them
and let people know about them'. But then again the question becomes 'why'.
Not everything is worthy of study or preservation. With several millions of
different species of insects alone, some just being random mutations of
others, why should we exhaustively catalog all of them? They are just the
result of _randomness_ , we ended up where we are out of _stochasticity_. What
is the underlying reason to preserve a random state of nature? Change is
natural, things come and go, so do species - nothing out of the ordinary about
it.

"Creatures such as these... adapted in an isolated island to grow fat and
large, without competition from mammalian predators on connected land-masses,
shine a light on Darwinian evolution."

Please tell what they tell us, or might tell us, that we don't know yet, and
what we can learn from them that requires a full reintroduction into existing
ecosystems of them.

"And from a purely 'awwww' perspective"

Ignoring the ad hominem fallacious reasoning, they have nothing that makes
them so special that only they could survive these circumstance and that we
can learn from; just a dumb coming together of circumstances, survivor bias.

"We've GOT A FUCKING ALIEN-LIKE SPECIES LIVING ON AN OCEAN OUTCROP HERE ON
EARTH."

Here I'm losing you completely. What is 'alien-like' about them, except from
having the same color as the antagonist in the 'alien' movie series? They're
just big bugs, so what? I seems like you're trying to say that because they
look like something movie producers imagined hostile alien life forms would
look like, that that makes them worthy of special treatment? Why would you put
such value into something - just because it looks like a CGI effect from a
Hollywood movie?

"A complex, beautiful, rare insect (did you watch the hatching vid?)... and
you wonder why it's worth keeping it around?"

None of the things you mention in the first part of your sentence indicate in
any way why one would expend effort at keeping it, it all falls back on
circular reasoning and 'because it's unique'. Not everything that is unique is
worth keeping. I have a broken pencil here on my desk that is in its shape
statistically very likely to be unique in the whole world. I'll still throw it
away.

~~~
panacea
"These are two contradictory statements in one statement."

Well I'm glad I got the opportunity to chat with you sir, and your smarts shut
me down. I'll shut up now.

Let me know when I can talk, and in the meantime

~~~
roel_v
Not sure if you pressed 'reply' too soon?

I'm quite confused, first you say you want to discuss, but then you get all
snarky and dismissive on me without going into the substance of the
discussion. If there are any rational reasons to want to preserve as many
species as possible, I'd like to be convinced. I was just pointing out that
your arguments weren't phrased consistently, and then went on to explain my
interpretation of what you were trying to say, so as to not get stuck in
pedanticism or requiring too much thought into what is, after all, an informal
discussion. I'm just trying to make my interpretations of your words explicit
by way of explaining the process that led to them, yet you seem to interpret
it as an ad hominem.

~~~
panacea
Sorry roel_v... I was IUI (Interneting under the influence).

------
tpatke
That's an amazing story. This insect was pretty lucky to live on the coolest
rock climbing crag I have ever seen...which requires a special permit to climb
[1]. I think I would have quite happily joined that "research" team.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balls_Pyramid>

~~~
arethuza
I'd rather have a house on a craggy island:

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/icesebra/3675752635/in/set-7215...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/icesebra/3675752635/in/set-72157600229451873/)

[Apparently the house belongs to Bjork].

------
xbryanx
Pics of Ball's Pyramid from Bryden Allen, one of the first people to summit
this wicked place: <http://www.uq.edu.au/nuq/jack/Bryden.html>

~~~
andrewkreid
Summit is a verb now?

~~~
ranit8
Disclaimer: English is not my first language.

In my experience, I see it's very, very common to turn a noun as a verb, in
informal contexts. Do you people still bother to make a distinction?

~~~
bebop
Yes we do make that distinction.

------
theon144
>"Eve became very, very sick. Patrick ... worked every night for a month
desperately trying to cure her. ... Eventually, based on gut instinct, Patrick
concocted a mixture that included calcium and nectar and fed it to his
patient, drop by drop, as she lay curled up in his hand."

They look just about damn disgusting, but the mental image produced by that
paragraph was just so... heart-warming.

------
vl
Wouldn't it be wonderful if this article was titled "Giant insect, presumed
extinct for 80 years, rediscovered, reproduces in the zoo"?

------
leke
The neighbouring Howe Island, is pure island porn. Ideal, steady annual
climate, no venomous or stinging life forms. There aren't even sharks in the
daytime waters.

~~~
jordan0day
It does apparently have a bit of a rat problem, though.

------
derrida
Any HN'ers in Sydney with a spare Yacht want to go check out Ball's pyramid?
I'll cook. :-)

~~~
ceejayoz
Just check the yacht for rats first...

~~~
derrida
We're not going to land! That'd be irresponsible!

~~~
huhtenberg
Rats can swim no problem.

------
ramblerman
"Step one, therefore, would be to mount an intensive (and expensive) rat
annihilation program. Residents would, no doubt, be happy to go rat-free, ..."

I despise rats. Yet I find it disconcerting that the author just brushes this
off as a triviality. We are perfectly happy saving one species by wiping out
another.

~~~
nazar
They should import cats. Thats how they got rid from enormous rat population
after Leningrad (current St.Petersburg, Russia) blockade during the WW2. That
would be a natural way of annihilating rat population(passive killing).

~~~
JL2010
So long as there's something there to eat cats. Introducing one invasive
species to cure another can lead to unpredictable ordeals.

~~~
nazar
There are always big predators at top of the biological food-energy chain.
They are few in numbers. Anyways, I believe populations of cats and rats will
fluctuate. Increase in cats will cause decrease in rats and then subsequent
decrease in cats. Like phase difference between sine and cosine wave graphs.

I believe introducing some small wild cat population would be a right thing to
do, tho I would like to hear opinions of experts.

Edit: I don't think cats are invasive in the way rats are

~~~
nigelsampson
Trouble with cats is they often destroy bird populations as well, not sure how
much of a problem this is in Australia, but in New Zealand feral cats are up
there with pests that need to wiped off any island that is to be
rehabilitated.

The Stephens Island Wren is an excellent example of this
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephens_Island_Wren>

~~~
nikatwork
Feral cats are a massive problem in rural Australia. They decimate small
native mammals. The idea of introducing them to control rats and save native
animals is insane - the cats would wipe out everything smaller than them.

Introducing a foreign species into an ecosystem has failed spectacularly so
many times I cannot believe people still propose it.

------
lionhearted
> The important thing, the scientists thought, was to get a few of these
> insects protected and into a breeding program. That wasn't so easy. The
> Australian government didn't know if the animals on Ball's Pyramid could or
> should be moved. There were meetings, studies, two years passed, and finally
> officials agreed to allow four animals to be retrieved. Just four.

> When the team went back to collect them, it turned out there had been a rock
> slide on the mountain, and at first they feared that the whole population
> had been wiped out.

This is why you just do things, bureaucrats be damned. Better to beg for
forgiveness than ask for permission.

~~~
srl
This is one of the few instances where I disagree with that attitude. The
risks involved in relocating ill-studied life forms are, obviously, enormous,
and it does need careful and dispassionate consideration. I'd much rather risk
a mildly interesting species go bye-bye than risk introducing a major
ecological stressor.

On the other hand, I might just be taking this stance because I'm so
unfamiliar with biological studies in general, and if I knew more, I'd happily
take a more gung-ho attitude towards these things.

~~~
lionhearted
Human error almost caused the species to go extinct -- I think it's fair,
right, and proper to move to restore them to their prior condition if
possible, and the situation was critical on the pyramid. It seems like a
pretty docile species based on the articles facts, and they could keep them
cordoned in a lab until they found what to do with them.

If the researchers and biologists felt it was the right play (which they did),
it seems like a dangerous risk to wait for committees of non-scientists to
make a political decision based on it.

~~~
mhartl
I had the same thought reading the article. There are risks either way;
bureaucratic deliberation has costs as well as benefits. In this case, the
relevant experts, in balancing those costs against the benefits, would
definitely _not_ have dithered for two years before acting.

We've definitely lost something here. As Peter Thiel noted: [1]

    
    
      There are ways that the government is working far less well than it used to.
      Just outside my office is the Golden Gate Bridge. It was built under FDR's
      Administration in the 1930s in about three and a half years. They're currently
      building an access highway on one of the tunnels that feeds into the bridge,
      and it will take at least six years to complete. 
    

I wonder what it might take to get that back.

[1] <http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1187>

~~~
m_myers
Galloping Gertie[1] was built in less than two years and lasted three months
before collapsing. There is a reason behind most bureaucratic procedures,
forgotten though it may be.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)>

------
verelo
I love stories like this! I can understand how difficult these guys will be to
introduce back into their original habitat...there will have to be extensive
investigation into if they will hurt the local economy (i.e. will they eat
plans that people sell for profit or use for food). Australia hasnt had a good
history of introducing or removing animals (take those rats as an example, and
then consider the Cain toad..not cool)

Just imagine how fulfilling it felt as the first insect escaped from its
vacuum pack...serious wow moment i imagine. I wish i was that valuable to this
world...

------
kpanghmc
From the Wikipedia article on Dryococelus australis [1]

"The ultimate goal is to produce a large population for re-introduction to
Lord Howe Island if the project to eradicate the invasive rats is successful."

I wonder what the 347 residents of Lord Howe Island think about this? It's an
amazing story and all, but I sure wouldn't want a bunch of these insects
introduced into my neighborhood.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryococelus_australis>

~~~
agrover
At what point do we consider those 347 residents as an invasive species?

~~~
ArbitraryLimits
It hardly seems fair to consider them an invasive species without considering
all humans one as well.

~~~
Gormo
Along with every other species in existence.

------
kayhi
Clickable wiki page for those that want to an image of the insect:

<http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryococelus_australis/>

~~~
Drbble
Huh. I clicked that link on my phone, and the mobile redirect got DNS hijacked
by t-mobile and redirected to a tmobile/yahoo domainsquat spam page.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
Bad trailing slash, I think, though it really should just err on the Wiki, not
get hijacked by an ISP.

<http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryococelus_australis>

~~~
literalusername
The URL with a trailing slash redirects to a 404. Presumably tmobile feels
they're providing a more useful result, and monetizing it. If my ISP did this
I would use a proxy.

------
threepointone
This is a fascinating story, but I must ask - does this belong on hacker news?
Please, I ask with no intended malice.

~~~
DanBC
From the guidelines:

> _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
> more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
> answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity._

> _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
> evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or
> disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's
> probably off-topic._

~~~
andrewflnr
I can totally see this on TV news, as a brief spot on a slow news day. But I
have to admit, if I was only going to admit one off topic story per week or
something, this one would make it.

------
sitkack
Another option which they probably explored was creating more habitat for them
on Ball's Pyramid. Maybe somewhere far away from the original area or increase
the cricket supply?

I do not envy being in that situation, where a mistake seals the fate of a
pretty awesome bug.

------
yaix
1k+ points wow, looks like HN hackers really like bugs...

------
theklub
That is amazing. I'm glad they were found.

------
malandrew
How does the mobile version have photo of the island but not have a photo of
the insect? Quite absurd. "Pics or didn't happen"

------
tommypjr
holy cow batman, am i happy to get out of there!

------
afterburner
My takeaway: Ball's Pyramid is one cool looking island.

------
gcb
Start up idea #769

Something that annihilates both mice AND giant insects

------
haldean
Warning: large, up-close image of creepy-crawly.

------
thespace
WHOA!! Look at those HUGE eyebrows!!

------
jimrandomh
This seems to me like a case of empathy gone awry. All that work and effort to
bring back a species of insects? There is no balance to preserve; they've been
gone for almost a century. Those resources could be spent preserving _human_
life.

~~~
justjimmy
What if those insects somehow hold a scientific discovery that can be a boon
to the human race? Like silk by spiders?

Or because of their large size, we could farm and grow them as alternative
food source?

Possibilities!

~~~
dvdhsu
There was an excellent article in the New Yorker about eating bugs some time
back.

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/15/110815fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/15/110815fa_fact_goodyear)

Unfortunately, it requires a subscription to read now.

