Hidden Kingdom This podcast is brought to you by Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Nick Yeats When you think of the creatures who call Aotearoa New Zealand home, it's tuatara, sheep, cows, and are many beautiful birds that come to mind. But did you know there are also over 20,000 species of insects flitting over and wriggling around the Land of the Long White Cloud. Because we've been isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for millions of years, over 90% of these insects aren't found anywhere else in the world, and many have evolved remarkably differently from their overseas relatives. Kia ora, I'm Nick Yeats, your host for this episode of The Amp, the Auckland Museum podcast, which amplifies incredible stories from our collections, our mahi and our place in the Pacific. In this episode, we're talking bugs. You wouldn't know it, but stored away behind the museum's walls are thousands and thousands of insects.
John Early Well, it's like all the other natural science collections. They're an important part of our biodiversity. You know, on a par with the herbarium, the plant collection, the bird and the lizard collection, the marine collection, and because insects are so numerous and abundant, they get a special collection as well.
Nick Yeats Natural sciences is a study of flora and fauna. Here at Auckland Museum, we have a number of natural sciences departments, including entomology, botany, marine and land vertebrates. It's all about exploring and discovering as much as we can about the natural world. For natural sciences, museums are like libraries collecting all sorts of specimens so researchers can study them. They are also one of the few places where extinct or endangered species can be studied without having to bother them in the wild or disturbing their natural behaviours and environment.
John Early And so it's important for us here to be particularly documenting the biodiversity, particularly in our local neighbourhood, which is, we say, is the top part of the North Island and its offshore islands. But we also collect insects and other living things from the rest of New Zealand, and also out into the Pacific. Because insects don't follow geopolitical boundaries. They follow biological necessities and where the habitats are.
Nick Yeats John Early is a lifelong bug enthusiast and our former Curator of Entomology. Now retired, John comes into the Museum each week as a Research Associate and continues his entomological work. But what is that? Melissa Kirk, our new Associate Entomology Curator explains. Melissa Kirk Entomology is the study of insects. It can be their biodiversity, evolution, behavioral ecology and their relationship with the environment and humans.
Nick Yeats Not to be confused with etymology, which is a study of the origin of words and how their meanings evolve over time. But while we're on the subject, here's a brief etymology of entomology. The Greek word “entomon”, which means notched, refers to the segmented body of the insect. Genetics, taxonomy, morphology, physiology, behaviour and ecology are all ways you can study creepy crawlies. We talked to Melissa inside the Entomology Collection Space, one of the coolest offices in the Museum. You wouldn't know it walking in, but you're surrounded by thousands and thousands of insects. They're tucked away in the drawers of big wooden cabinets that line three of the four walls, and inside an island in the middle, just drawers and drawers of insects, from tiny mites to great big tarantulas. Like the majority of our good few million collection items, most insects are kept stored away to help keep them safe. But we also have a fantastic range of specimens on display, a lot of which live in our Weird and Wonderful gallery where you can get up close to all sorts of creatures from around the world.
Natasha Thomas-McKenzie Can I show you guys something cool? There we go, the king baboon tarantula. And this is the tarantula hawk wasp. So this guy lands on this guy paralyzes him and lays all their eggs on the baboon tarantula, and he's alive the whole time, but he's paralyzed. He's a pretty mean hawk wasp, isn't he?
Nick Yeats That’s Natasha Thomas-McKenzie, a descendent of Ngāti Kahu, Te Rarawa and Ngāti Mahurehure, one of the Museum’s Learning Specialists for Early Childhood Education. One of the programs Natasha teaches is investigating insects at the heart of Weird and Wonderful surrounded by dozens of real specimens.
Natasha Thomas-McKenzie Our entomology programme offers a delightful opportunity for students to come to the Auckland Museum and learn more about bugs, and extend their knowledge on anything that they've been learning to do with entomology at school or in their learning centres, that we can extend their knowledge on insects, arachnids, myriapods, and we, most of all, we hope that they just have an amazing time and share all their newfound knowledge with their friends and family.
Nick Yeats Throughout the gallery, there are jars filled with mysterious creatures and different coloured liquids, drawers full of specimens from all across the natural world, which you can open and look at closely - there's all sorts of things to see and do.
Natasha Thomas-McKenzie Play is how children soak up their knowledge and having real experiences, remembering these, relating to them, connecting them. We really hope that, you know, keeps igniting their curiosity. And we hope that we have future entomologists, and they can learn and help teach others about the world around them and how important it is to everyone.
Nick Yeats More than just a pretty or slightly terrifying face. Some of the insects in the gallery have a bit of a back story. The insects on display appear ageless, preserved and well cared for. You probably wouldn't suspect that many of them are that much older than any of us peering at them today, but a number of insects were once celebrities who starred in the Insect Wonder House. This exhibition was displayed on the premises of one of Auckland's first department stores, the very upmarket Milne and Choyce Limited. The grand art deco building on Queen Street is now a heritage office building with a luggage and outdoor clothing shop on the street level. A seemingly odd place for an entomology display, but at the time, department store exhibitions were a way to entice customers, keep the kids occupied whilst he did a spot of shopping. Picture mothers and pets and gloves taking the lift to the store's fifth floor, children trailing behind, eager to see the shimmering, surprising and sometimes scary specimens up close
Voice Actor The exhibition of insects being held at Milne and Choyce’s has been open three weeks. Interest in its contents show no sign of abating.
Nick Yeats That's from a 1937 article in the Auckland star. The insect wonder house was an exhibition featuring over 2000 insects from all over the world. From beetles, butterflies and moths to spiders and scorpions. It also claimed to have the world's largest insect, a stick insect. This actually wasn't true, but hey, why let the truth get in the way of a good story…or shopping trip? The world's largest insect is actually Aotearoa’s very own giant wētā, the little barrier giant wētā - deinacrida heteracantha. But stick insects have retained the title of the longest insects. The longest found to date, measured a huge 64 centimetres. That's about two rulers long. The stick insect in the House of Wonder collection was about forty-two and a half centimetres long. So still not something I'd want to stumble across in the wild…
The exhibition's creator and collector of the insects was Wilfred Hubert Hemingway, a businessman and lifelong amateur entomology devotee. An old black and white photo we found of him, shows him to be a studious looking man, his eyes framed by small wire spectacles, wearing a stiff collar and tie. The insects weren't laid out in a scientific way, but instead arranged for “laymen, women and children to enjoy”.
Voice Actor When you enter the little room in the premises of Milne and Choyce Ltd, where is housed the display of insects loaned by Mr. W H Hemingway of Auckland, you enter a new world. You see moths, butterflies, beetles, spiders, such as you've never dreamed of. That is unless you have been something of a collector yourself…
Nick Yeats Hemingway encouraged schoolchildren's visits to the exhibition with prizes of two guineas, one guinea and ten and sixpence for the best drawn maps showing the countries that the specimens had come from by children. Back in the day, the guinea was worth slightly more than a pound. Today, that's more than 150 bucks, not bad at all for a kid!
Voice Actor There were forty-three cases on display, each filled with exhibits which demonstrate the power and wonder of nature. But if nothing is learned of their story, their beauty, at least, they can never be forgotten. There is one case of butterflies, for example, which come from Central and South America. They look as if all light had been captured by their wings. They are in glorious shades of iridescent blues. This leads to mention of the largest of all insects, the giant phasmid, found in Australia and New Guinea. It is sixteen and three quarter inches long, with a wing spread of eight and three quarter inches. It is a fearsome looking thing, though a placard says it is harmless.
Nick Yeats But behind the excitement of the exhibition, there was another story that underpinned the Insect Wonder House and the creatures that it featured. Wilfred Hemingway was a colonial collector, and his actions were completely at odds with modern museum practice. While researching for this episode, it became clear his entomological interest was only one part of his life, and he collected more widely and acted in ways we would think are inappropriate today, maybe even in ways that people at the time wouldn't have agreed with. We also discovered some really uncomfortable truths. He was able to use his wealth to travel and to collect taonga in what seemed likely to be exploitative ways from across the Pacific and even further afield. The circumstances of his collecting need more investigation, and then the Museum will have some decisions to make about how to represent or restore any wrongdoing. We also discovered one of the Museum's most important wētā specimens somehow made its way into Hemingway's personal collection…
John Early Yeah, that's interesting. It turns out that after he died, his widow donated his collection to the museum, and that's why we have it. But amongst it was this giant wētā specimen, and it's got a little handwritten note with it saying it's the type specimen of a species described by William Colenso, who's very, very famous missionary naturalist back in the late 1800s saying that it's the type specimen of a species that he described, and he called it Hemideina gigantea, and subsequently, well, people were never quite sure, really, whether it was or not. But I did do some sleuthing with the archival correspondence, and I'm convinced that it is Colenso’s specimen. But why was it in Hemingway's collection at his house, not in a storage box here? I don't know. I suspect it was spectacular, and Hemingway's most of his collection of foreign insects focused on interesting, spectacular things. I can't help but think, did he just sort of take a shine to it? Who knows. But anyway, fortunately, it came back to the museum after he died. So yes, it went for a little holiday yeah.
Nick Yeats Part of being a museum means we inherit collections, narratives and histories that aren't always what they seem at first sight. The past is complex. Our collections today are part of that complex legacy.
Melissa Kirk Hemingway donated thousands of specimens to Auckland Museum. Some of them are currently being integrated into what we call our exotic collection, which is a research collection, and they're integrated due to their locality information. However, some of them lost their locality information and are used for things like display or exhibitions, and you can even find some in the Weird and Wonderful drawers.
Nick Yeats Locality information is a record of where and when the specimen was found, how it was trapped, and other useful information like what kind of plant it was found on. This is a crucial part of research collections. Without this information, the insects can't be studied with the full potential to understand their wider ecology and distribution, the interconnections in their neighbourhood and further afield. Even though the insects on display don't have complete information, people can still come in and be inspired by the natural world, and have access to things they would never get to see otherwise. Today, there's not a lot of reason to collect natural science taonga from across the whole world. Culturally, ecologically - attitudes and needs have shifted - and you could say it's not ours to take. Now our work in the field is a lot closer to home to gain a better understanding of the natural world and our place in it.
Melissa Kirk Our main collecting focus is on the Auckland region, some of the offshore islands, as well as Northland, where we work closely with Ngāti Kuri. Our collecting involves a lot of field work in all sorts of different areas, and we focus on gaps in our collection. And this can be underrepresented areas or underrepresented insects. Nick Yeats There are discoveries to be made everywhere, sometimes even closer to home in our own backyards.
John Early Look, this is one of the positive sides of lockdown. Yeah, I had been focused on collecting insects in natural, undisturbed ecosystems, you know, forests, subalpine and all that kind of stuff. And I thought I've never really looked at what's in my garden, and so I did. I made, I have these little yellow pan traps, and I put out ten of them in my, what I call it, my compost heap. It's just a corner of the section where I toss all kitchen scraps and the gardening scraps, blah, blah, and another ten I just sort of dotted around the edge of the lawn and amongst the ornamentals.
Nick Yeats A pan trap is a great way to catch a bug. Melissa Kirk Well, the interesting thing with pan traps are they're just little yellow plastic bowls. They can come in different colours, but yellow is the most used because most insects are attracted to yellow, so it gets the most diversity, but they’re literally like two-dollar bowl.
Nick Yeats Pan traps are the size of cereal bowls, and as Melissa says, usually brightly coloured. They’re used to gather samples of insects in a particular area. Insect vision is quite different from human vision, but they do see colours, and they use their colour vision to get around and find food. Yellow is a popular choice because the insects associate yellow with pollen. Drifting about, completely unaware of the worldwide COVID panic, a group of insects descended on an innocuous looking bowl.
John Early I remember one day, you know, I put the traps out, and when I went just checking on them after the first date, what's in there? What's in there? Because it's always a bit of a lucky dip, and I saw these things that looked like a bee or a wasp it was a bit hard to tell, because the pan traps have got water in them, and so they're very bedraggled. And when I looked, I thought is it a bee? Doesn't look quite right for a bee. Is it one of the bee-like wasps that we have? Could be but it's not one of the species, because the number of species that should look like that that I know quite well, there are only three of them, and it didn't really fit. So, I fished one out and dried it off, and when I looked at it, I thought, “Oh, I think I know what this is”. When you look at its face front on, you see the two eyes down the side, and the eyes come down, and then there's this big notch in the side of the eyes. I thought that's unusual. Not many bees or no bee has that for a start, so that rules out the bees. And I thought it looks very much like a mason wasp. But I know there are some other wasps that have it in other parts of the world, so I couldn't be sure. So, I had to go to literature and find a big worldwide thing. So fortunately, I could tell which group of insects it was in, so I knew where to go and use the keys there to narrow down what family it belonged to, within that family, what tribe it belonged to, and within that tribe, “oh, hello, there's only one genus that has eyes like that”. And sure enough, it's a mason wasp. But it was not the common Mason wasp that we know from New Zealand.
Nick Yeats The wasp from John's back garden was an Australian species which hadn't previously shown up in Aotearoa – a backyard breakthrough. When I talked to our Entomology Curator, Melissa, for this episode, she'd mentioned that some of the Australian species we now have in New Zealand, could have got here by travelling on the wind across the ocean – what a journey.
One of the exciting things about being an entomologist in Aotearoa is just how much more there is out there to uncover. John has had a few discoveries of his own.
John Early Well, actually, it's, it's, it's hundreds. It's, it's sort of, well, it's a bit ho hum, really, because that's normal if you're working in entomology in New Zealand, there are so many undescribed species. But the very first one I discovered, I didn't realise its significance at the time, but I was down on the Snares Islands, down below Stewart Island, and on one of the smaller of the islands, went there one day, and I was collecting around under a particular plant, and I found this weevil, which is about two centimetres long, and it's beautiful, dark maroony red on its back, with gold bits in between the little ridges. And when I got back to the base, we got back to the main island, and my supervisor, who had been there for my thesis, who was leading the expedition, saw, and he just about fell over, because he had spent 15 months continuously on that island at one stage, and he just about knew every species that was there, and he'd never seen this before. So, the very first new insect, apart from the little wasp I studied, was this beautiful weevil about this big, and it didn't have a name. It's now got a name. But the sad thing is, people from Te Papa have been down there more recently, and they've been looking for it, and they can't find it, and they're starting to think it's gone extinct.
Nick Yeats Sadly, as we all know, extinction is a very real threat around the world, insect species are disappearing rapidly, which, as John and Melissa said earlier, could be disastrous for entire ecosystems because of the vital roles that insects play. It might seem counterintuitive to continue collecting in this environment, but this is the main way that we can find out which species are thriving and which are barely surviving. So, our methods of collecting and the reasons why we collect have changed significantly since the more “Wild West” days of Hemingway and amateur collectors like him.
Melissa Kirk Back in the day, there was a lot of collecting that probably wouldn't happen nowadays. We have more sustainable ways of collecting, and a lot of particularly exotic specimens in our collection are now protected by CITES… Nick Yeats CITES - that is C, I, T, E, S - is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. Melissa Kirk …and we've also got New Zealand species that are protected by our Wildlife Act that you cannot collect.
Nick Yeats There's a lot more focus on the way we collect insects. John Early You know, conservation is always in our mind. We try and not over collect. You know, do we really need fifty specimens of this particular winsome looking beetle from the same locality? No, we don't. And any more than that, you don't need you've got the record that they're there. And of course, with an awful lot of things, no you only pick up one or two at most.
Nick Yeats And the goal is a lot more about understanding our environment and the interactions of the ecosystem. One of the ways we conduct our research and scientific collecting is through something called a BioBlitz.
Melissa Kirk A BioBlitz is basically trying to determine a quick snapshot of the biodiversity in a certain area, and we go to different areas, regions, and kind of do all sorts of different collection methods or traps or monitoring surveys to determine what is present. We can have anything from insect collecting happening, so we'll put out different trap types, but also our botany team will be going through the area and seeing what plant species are present, and other teams might be doing bird watching or counts in the area to survey, “oh okay, I saw this bird”, or it might even be “I heard this bird”, so trying to get an idea and a picture as to what the biodiversity is in an area.
Nick Yeats And of course, in terms of day-to-day biodiversity monitoring, there just aren't enough entomologists to go around to spot everything crawling and flying about in the wild. If you look at specimens and insect collections and you plot their distribution, they line up pretty closely to main roads, parks or where entomologists spend their summer holidays...There's a built-in bias when specimen spotting in nature, people have to be there to do it. One amazing resource that helps bridge the gap is iNaturalist, which is like a Wikipedia for the natural world. Anyone can use it to log their finds, connecting all sorts of scientific dots.
Melissa Kirk I would say citizen science is very important. Yes, like iNaturalist is a good example, because it's a lot of citizens and amateurs and people who are just, I guess, interested in it, but maybe not professionally trained or, like, studied a certain subject. However, a lot of these citizen scientists are extremely knowledgeable and extremely passionate, and they're really helping us get a picture of kind of, like, our biodiversity all over the world. Yeah, there's been new species records found before. So when an exotic species has come into countries before, is sometimes iNaturalist, which is the, someone on iNaturalist, which is the first point of record, so the first person to find it, and it's also helped find species that they thought were extinct or, yeah, suspected locally extinct or extinct.
Nick Yeats iNaturalist allows people from all over the world to crowdsource information, which has led to some pretty exciting discoveries.
Melissa Kirk A recent example is the rediscovery of the Frosted Phoenix. So, it was accidentally rediscovered after sixty-five years by a tourist in New Zealand. They put out a UV light because they were interested in moths, and came back to it later and found an unusually like, robust-looking moth. Was unsure what the idea of it was, and then they took a photo and upload it onto iNaturalist, and that's where experts basically ideated to the Frosted Phoenix.
Nick Yeats The Frosted Phoenix moth is pretty legendary in Aotearoa’s entomological circles, with its sixty-five-year absence, it was feared to be lost forever. In fact, when the tourist Pav Johnsson heard the news, he said he hadn't realised he'd found “the holy grail of New Zealand moths”. Like many lost things, sometimes they show up when you finally stop looking. There are literally countless more insects who have yet to make themselves known to us, and even more so the roles they play in our ecosystem.
Melissa Kirk There's millions of insects, many of which are yet to be actually described. And then the second thing is how important they are to us, because they provide so many ecosystem services. Like a lot of people with flies are like, “Ew, flies!”, but I'm like, “no, flies are great!” They're like decomposers, obviously, but they're also pollinators. They're used in forensic entomology, which is very cool. Nick Yeats Insects are essential for so many things, but it's easy to overlook them.
John Early I wish people would realise how important they are in keeping ecosystems going and the value of them for doing that. I mean, they're so important, particularly, say, in decomposition, breaking down leaves, twigs, dead animals, all that kind of thing, so much and the recycling of nutrients back into the soil, for soil fertility to make the forests and whatnot grow. Yeah, and you know, I do wish people would not just think an insect is something to be squished. I really don't understand that. I mean, even spiders, which we tend to have, or most people have an aversion to, they are interesting, and they don't, they're not out to get you.
Nick Yeats Look, I get it, seeing a wētā on your loo roll, or a spider dangling down beside you isn't always a welcome sight…but bugs are our friends. They're busy little folks with a big job to do quite often without a lot of praise.
Melissa Kirk So a lot of people know that bees are pollinators, but a lot of other insects are pollinators as well, so flies and beetles as well, and then also, they kind of make our world go round and so many insects are involved in that process. They all have different functional roles within our ecosystems. Some of them are predators. So dragonflies, fun fact, one of the best predators in the world. So, they help regulate populations of their prey. Everything has a function. Keeping the biodiversity is important, because not everything is going to be able to withstand global changes, whether it be habitat change and use, or climate change or the use of pesticides.
Nick Yeats You don't need to be the biggest fan of bugs to appreciate the sometimes pretty grimy jobs they do. You can show your thanks by planting native trees for our unique and hard-working insects. Mānuka or kowhai, not only beautiful additions to your garden space, are hosts for the bug life endemic to Aotearoa, and a welcome mat for the insects in your neighbourhood. You could even join the ranks of our bug buddies and see what work there is to be done.
John Early Well, there's no shortage of work to be, to be done, but with I mean the economy, job losses…there's a, seems to be a shrinking pool of people working in these areas of frontline research. So, the future of Entomology? I couldn't honestly counsel a student to say, “oh, great career prospects in entomology!” You might be lucky. It will be immensely, personally rewarding. But if you want to get rich, become a plumber or something like that, you know, or get into the funeral business, because people will always die. But in terms of satisfaction, if that's where your interest is, I mean, it's great because there's just, there are new species turning up all over the place. Yeah.
Nick Yeats If John hasn't put you off, and you do decide to pursue a career in entomology, you could become a curator like Melissa. Your days could be spent going through boxes of specimens, IDing them, and then curating them based on that taxonomy, genus and species, working on new acquisitions that may have been donated from lifelong collectors, heading out on field trips and caring for the collection, conserving and protecting them for the future.
Maybe for now, start with a little yellow bowl. Grab your dish soap, head out to the garden and see what you can discover. I'm Nick Yeats, and that was ‘Hidden Kingdom’. This episode was written and produced by Laura Skerritt and Steph Strock. Sound design by Sara O'Brien. The executive producer was Teresa Cowie from Connect Content. Thanks to our guests, John Early and Melissa Kirk, voice acting by Adam Burrell.
For more information about the Insect Wonder House and to read more blogs about all things entomology, head to the link in our show notes. On the next episode of The Amp, we find out how the Museum acquired its Egypt collection, and deep dive into a fascinating story behind one of the items, a mummy who had been mistakenly identified for many years, disconnecting her even more from her home and her story.