Six new alpine species of New Zealand’s most unusual and beloved insect — the weta — have been discovered, but it is a bittersweet victory, with another piece of research describing the threat global warming poses for their snowy mountain habitat.
Weta belong to the same group of insects as crickets and grasshoppers, and there are between 70 and 100 species of weta endemic to New Zealand. They are wingless and nocturnal, and some, including the wetapunga, are among the heaviest insects in the world — comparable to the weight of a sparrow.
Forests, grasslands, caves and alpine terrains once crawled with weta, but their populations have suffered with the introduction of foreign pests and increasing habitat decline due to dairy farming. Sixteen of New Zealand’s weta species are at risk, and the rest are classified as threatened or endangered.
Now, global warming is speeding up their decline, particularly for the elusive alpine weta that live in the mountains — a terrain that is gradually disappearing and becoming more isolated.
“We knew that there are weta up there in the high elevation, but the description of their variation has never been done, because although we knew they were there, they were not getting a lot of observation,” Massey University ecologist and weta expert Steve Trewick said.
The alpine weta are agile and have an impressive ability to freeze themselves solid during the harsh winter months before thawing out again when spring arrives.
However, within the excitement of the “fantastic” discovery comes a grim a realization.
“Now we know they are there and can sit back and watch as they go extinct,” Trewick said.
“We’re still discovering what we have, and at the same time as we’re discovering that, we know that biodiversity is more threatened than ever before,” he said, adding that alpine habitats were top of the list for destruction.
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found it was now “almost inevitable” that temperatures would rise above 1.5°C — the level above which many of the effects of climate breakdown become irreversible.
A Royal Society research paper Trewick co-authored looks at climate change and alpine insects, including the weta’s cousin, the grasshopper. It shows that global warming is seriously threatening the alpine environment, which is expected to have devastating consequences for biodiversity.
“As the planet warms, the alpine zone moves up mountain, so the cold conditions become more and more attenuated for the tops of mountains — and mountains are a finite height,” he said.
When those alpine environments shrink, they become isolated from other similar terrain, creating small, isolated populations of animals, which then become more prone to extinction.
While the research is focused on New Zealand biodiversity and terrain, Trewick said it has wider applications, and demonstrates that “no part of the planet is exempt from global climate change.”
“All those taxa that are associated with those habitats are going to increasingly feel the pinch over the next 30 to 50 years. We are talking within human lifetimes.”
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