wetapunga the giant weta of the northern offshore islands

Size
Length: 5–10 cm, Weight: 35 g
Lifespan
2–3 years
Diet
Herbivorous and scavenging. Feeds on leaves, fruit, seeds, and small insects. Also scavenges on dead birds and invertebrates. The world's heaviest insect by mass.
Habitat
The dinosaur cricket once ruled the leaf litter across northern New Zealand from Northland down to the Bay of Plenty and the East Cape. Now survives naturally only on Hauturu (Little Barrier Island).
Range
Now confined to predator-free offshore islands including Hauturu (Little Barrier Island) and several mainland sanctuaries with intensive predator control. Historically widespread throughout the upper North Island.
Endemism
Endemic
Main Threats
Predation by rats, mice, stoats, cats, and hedgehogs is the primary threat. Habitat loss from forest clearance. Extinct on the mainland. Survives only on predator-free offshore islands and in captive breeding programmes.
Population
Once widespread across the upper North Island. Decimated by Pacific rats (kiore), ship rats, cats, and habitat clearance. Declared extinct on the mainland by the 1970s. Intensive captive breeding and translocation programmes have reintroduced wētāpunga to several mainland sanctuaries.
Conservation Status
At Risk - Recovering
Meet the wētāpunga. The name means god of ugly things in Māori, and honestly, that is fair. It is enormous, spiky, slow-moving, and looks like it crawled out of a dinosaur's nightmare. But here is the twist. It is a vegetarian. A gentle, leaf-munching, fruit-nibbling, seed-scattering teddy bear in armoured trousers. What makes it special is size. A pregnant female wētāpunga can weigh up to thirty-five grams. That is heavier than a sparrow, heavier than a mouse, and comfortably heavier than any other insect on the planet by mass. It does not fly. It does not need to. It just walks slowly across the forest floor, antennae waving like TV aerials, eating plants and being magnificent. What does it do? Everything a small mammal would do, but slower and with more legs. Wētāpunga are nocturnal browsers. At night, they climb into the canopy to feed on leaves, fruit, and seeds. During the day, they hide in hollow branches, under bark, or in root systems. And here is the ecological magic. They are seed dispersers. They eat fruit, wander around, and deposit seeds metres away. In a forest without ground-dwelling mammals, the wētāpunga is the gardener. Breeding is slow. Females use a long, needle-like ovipositor (not a stinger, it is for laying eggs) to inject eggs into soft soil or rotting wood. Nymphs take two to three years to reach adulthood. That slow life cycle worked fine when the only predator was the laughing owl. It did not work when rats arrived. Why did it nearly vanish? Rats. Specifically, the kiore brought by Māori and the ship rats brought by Europeans. Wētāpunga evolved without mammalian predators. They do not run. They do not hide fast. They just sit there, being fat and delicious, while rats gnaw their abdomens open. By the 1970s, the mainland population was gone. Why is it recovering? Because we finally figured out that if you kill the rats, the wētāpunga comes back. Captive breeding, predator-free sanctuaries, and intensive translocations have pulled it back from the edge. It is not safe yet. But for the first time in a century, the god of ugly things is returning to the mainland. It is a living fossil, a heavyweight champion, and proof that extinction is not always the end.