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)
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Just what I was hoping to see
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.
Looking for weird sticks doesn’t make anyone rich though. Think of the economy for once.
Won’t anyone think of the
shareholder value!
Sorry, the best we can do is fascism, open corruption, and rampant anti-intellectualism.
He long
He not that thicc
And most importantly
He look like sticc
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.
We don’t even know how much there is to know or if such a limit can exist at all
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?
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You could also look at insect penises for a living, a very common way of identifying species in various insect groups ;)
Bug if true
That’s no excuse, if we all grab a random stick to check if it’s an undiscovered species of stick insects…
How’s that concealment trick of yours working now Mr. Dickinsect? On the random luck scale we are equals!
If that was found in Australia, it’s
- Poisonous
- Venomous
- Chlamydic
- aggressive and bitey
- invasive
One or more of the above. No exceptions.
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 …
Is that… the Insulindian Phasmid?
…listen…
…here…
The math checks out.
Something Beautiful is Going To Happen
I miss that guy, must be on threads
New TV game Insect Cake or the real deal?
