Text Transcription
A series of Tweets, each a reply to the previous.
- ABC News @ABC: Scientists have discovered a giant new species of stick insect in Australia, which is over 15 inches long and researchers say may be the heaviest insect in the country. [With a picture of a brown stick insect among some green leaves.]
- mary @theoceanblooms: can I ask a question: how does something like this go undiscovered until now
- soul nate @MNateShyamalan: Entomologist here 🙋♂️🤓🐜 Great question! It may seem surprising that the scientific community could miss an entire bug species after all this time, especially when it’s THIS big. The answer might surprise you more 👀 Let’s dive in 👇🧵 (1/?)
- soul nate @MNateShyamalan: he look like stick (2/2)
I miss that guy, must be on threads
He long
He not that thicc
And most importantly
He look like sticc
Bug if true
They live high up in the tree canopy. Not like people missed a monster bug walking down the trail.
Wasn’t there a story where scientists sprayed a whole tree with insecticide in the rainforest and they discovered tenths of new bug species?
Yes. Also, tenths of newly extinct bug species.
We pay millions out to researchers just to look at sticks, leaves, and rocks to determine if they are bugs or not. Wait, that’s wrong …
The answer is that we don’t fund science at the rate that we should, especially not bug science. Want discoveries? Gotta pay someone to actually do the work.
You mean that scientists don’t just hang out outside during their free time and go looking for new species? That’s not how it works?
Looking for weird sticks doesn’t make anyone rich though. Think of the economy for once.
Won’t anyone think of the
shareholder value!Think of the stockholders!
Just what I was hoping to see
Why do they wiggle tho
because sticks wiggle in the wind. it’s all part of their masterful ploy
maybe its windy?
It’s like he’s trying to juke me out. I bet he breaks ankles
How could an animal that has perfected <evading detection> evade our detection?
Truly the noodlest of noodle scratchers.
But humans love to pick up sticks. How has nobody picked this guy up by accident?
They probably have.
But if you came across a random bug, especially a big one like that, wouldn’t you assume other people already knew about it? I would.
I mean sure you might take a pic and send it to a few people, but they would probably also assume it’s known.
how does something like this go undiscovered until now
I don’t know the specifics of this particular insect’s origin story, but for a surprising number of insects & arthropods, the answer can be summarized as “nobody bothered to look closely enough”.
Sometimes that’s a literal fact – the critter is so well disguised, lives in a remote or hard to reach location, or is so uncommon that nobody’s ever noticed it before. But with surprising frequency, it’s a case where previously undiscovered species have been right under our noses (or feet or rocks in our suburban yards) this whole time and we simply did not realize it. It’s not that we don’t notice them, just that nobody’s ever taken the time to really study them enough to spot the differences from one closely related species to the next so we simply assumed they’re all the same.
For example, there are species of beetles that about the only reliable way to tell them apart is to count the hairs on their butt when they are larvae. As adults, they are nearly indistinguishable. Now imagine that nobody ever took the time to study larval butt hair.I guess what I’m saying is, we need more funding for bug butt hair and general bug butt hair awareness, because it’s a thing.
Without going into what “species” means exactly - because I know that’s complicated - can you explain why those beetles are different species despite being nearly identical as adults? Is it just that they cannot interbreed?
I would love to tell people i count bug butt hair for a living. Where do i signup?
You could also look at insect penises for a living, a very common way of identifying species in various insect groups ;)
This work comes from unpaid internships or you are paying to get your masters.
Last time this meme came up I had the perfectly worded Disco Elysium quote ready, but I’ve forgotten it. So just pretend I said it right now.
Wow. That was perfect. I’m a better man for the timing of that quote
I keep hearing about the game but your quote finally convinced me to find the time and play through it myself.
You won’t regret it! The game really is a singular experience.
I am a relatively median lifeform, while you are extreme, all-engulfing madness. A volatile simian nervous system, ominously new to the planet.
People put far too much faith the idea that we as a society know most, or even all there is to know. Humanity has advanced far and increasingly faster in recent years, but we still know basically nothing in terms of the grand scale of things to discover and know.
Even now, our methods of discovering things like new species are far less advanced than people like this probably imagine - it basically boils down to time, persistence, and luck.
That, and every grad student and upwards worst nightmare: funding
Something Beautiful is Going To Happen
Is that… the Insulindian Phasmid?
If that was found in Australia, it’s -Poisonous -Venomous
- Chlamydic
- aggressive and bitey
- invasive
One or more of the above. No exceptions.
I’d be terrible at discovering new species because I would assume anything I found was already discovered and exhaust myself looking for it in databases.
That’s probably a big part of why this took so long to be described by science.
