(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
BY STEVEN SPARKMAN
ANCHOR STEVEN SPARKMAN
Photos snapped by a nature lover went viral this weekend. No, it’s not a picture of a beach or a sunset. It’s something a little more... creepy.
“Here is the world’s largest insect. There you go. Now, if you see there, that insect is sitting in the palm of a man’s hand, filling his hand, and he’s chewing on a carrot there. This is called a giant weta. He has a wingspan of close to seven inches, and this one here was caught on camera by a world-renowned entomologist, Mark Moffet...”
Moffett said he spent several nights searching New Zealand’s Little Barrier Island before he found the huge bug. He fed it a carrot so it would hold still for picture taking. That’s quite a bug lover.
Most people who saw the photos probably had the same reaction as Neil Patrick Harris on ABC’s LIVE! With Kelly.
Kelly Ripa: “That is...”
Neil Patrick Harris: “Guh! Oh my god!”
Ripa: “It’s called a giant weta. W-E-T-A. Weta”
Harris: “Yeah, if I saw it, I’d be like ‘Weta hell?’”
Ripa: “That’s how it got it’s name. ‘Weta hell is that?’”
Headlines have been calling Moffett’s weta the world’s biggest insect, at 71 grams and 7 inches long. But is the weta really king? MSNBC’s Alan Boyle points out, it depends what you mean by “biggest.”
“By some accounts, goliath beetles can reach a weight of 100 grams during their larval stage and achieve a wingspan of nearly 10 inches. The White Witch moth, meanwhile, has a wingspan of up to 12 inches, which is wider than the wings of a sparrow. But if you confine yourself strictly to adult insects, and define ‘big’ in terms of weight, Moffett appears to have a good case.”
But the New Zealand Herald went to New Zealand’s famous bug man, Ruud Kleinpaste, who takes issue with Moffett’s claim.
“‘There's nothing unusual to find these weta,’ Kleinpaste said, though he thought the publicity for the species could be a good thing. ‘I think it's wonderful as long as weta get the attention and not that idiot American.’ … He said wetapunga were nice, non-aggressive creatures, but ‘if you really piss them off they will cut you in half.’”
Kleinpaste went on to say the heaviest recorded weta weighed 72 grams -- slightly heavier than Moffett’s monster.
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