Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, around two hundred and eighty five million years ago, if you had been walking through a Permian floodplain, you might have seen a griffin fly dragonfly like insect the size of a crow. It was huge, partly because atmospheric oxygen during this time was something like thirty it's down around today, And it turns out that the amount of oxygen present in the atmosphere is the
limiting factor in how big a bug can get. Although we no longer have dragonflies flying around with two foot wingspans that's over half a meter, there are some standouts among modern insects. Take Wallace's giant b a taxonomical name Mega chile pluto. It's the world's largest B. Females of the species can grow up to the size of an adult humans thumb that's about one and a half inches long or nearly forty millimeters, with a wingspan of two
and a half inches or over sixty millimeters. That's about five times the size of the European honeybees you're used to seeing. The females also have large mandibles used for scraping up tree resin to line their nests, but it was recently thought to have gone the way of the
griffin fly. Nobody had seen Wallace's giant bee since nineteen eighty one, and before that no scientists had clapped eyes on it since its discovery in eighteen fifty eight by Alfred Russell Wallace, the English biologist who independently conceived of the theory of evolution through natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin. Of course, researchers knew this didn't necessarily mean it was extinct. It's just very difficult to prove that an organism exists if you can't find it alive.
But in January of twenty nineteen, a team of researchers traveled to a collection of little islands in Indonesia called the North Malaccas, and they found this be beheemoth nesting in a termite nest on a tree trunk. Clay Bolt, a natural history photographer who captured the first photos and video of a live giant bee, said in a press release, to actually see how beautiful and big the species is in life, to hear the sound of its giant wings thrumming as it flew past my head was just incredible.
Over the years, a few research expeditions had set out to find Wallace's Giant bee, but they came up empty handed. In the meantime, however, specimens would show up for sale. One appeared on eBay in the auction for nine thousand one dollars. In case you were wondering, that's more than
what the corpse of an insect usually goes for. The exact island on which the bee was found is a secret because the researchers fear that if they published that information, the remaining Wallace's Giant bees might not be long for this world given that type of auction price tag. Since the bee has only been viewed a few times in the wild, not much is known about its habits in life history, other than that it seems to like to
live in termite nests in lowland forest areas. Indonesia lost fift of its tree cover between two thousand one seventeen to make way for agricultural fields, So our rekindled romance with Wallace's Giant b might not last long if conservation efforts aren't put in place soon. But in the meantime, it's nice to know that Wallace's Giant B is still buzzing through the forest like a tiny helicopter the giant griffin flies of the Permian. Shirley would have wanted it
that way. Today's episode is based on the article Wallace's Giant B World's largest Rediscovered on house to forks dot com, written by Jesslin Shields. Brain Stuff is a production of by Heart Radio in partnership with house toworks dot com, and it is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show else