Identifying Dunedin's Small Wildlife
Wild Dunedin — Apr 5, 2020
Wild Dunedin is lucky to have Samuel Purdie as our bug identifier. You might find these invertebrates in your backyard or in some native forest close by.
Sam Purdie at our 2020 Festival launch wearing a live corsage of kānuka with native stick insect. Image by: Jeannie Hayden
Pictured is a species of native stick insect from the Acanthoxyla genus. Image by: Samuel Purdie
"This is a species of native stick insect from the Acanthoxyla genus. These beautiful, large stick insects are commonly called prickly stick insects due to their defensive spines that also likely help add to their camouflage strategy. They can vary greatly in colour. Being parthenogenic they reproduce via cloning themselves and are all females. They like to hang out on people's rose bushes, blackberries and in the wild they will consume bush lawyer, kānuka, mānuka... to name a few. " Samuel Purdie
I discovered this rather big spider on my apple tree and sent it to Sam for identification.
Nursery web spider out on the underside of an apple tree leaf. Image by: Jeannie Hayden
"That's a nursery web spider, Dolomedes minor. They make a wee 'nursery' web for all their babies and will often be seen on the web :) They are a nocturnal species and will generally hunt at night.
At night you'll see them (and their babies when they grow up) if you shine a torch because they have a reflective tapetum lucidum to maximise incoming light so their eyes STAND OUT!" Samuel Purdie
You often see their nursery webs on gorse.
Last year we opened the festival at Sinclair Wetlands and from the boardwalk we saw quite a few nursery web spider webs. Image by: Izumi Schmidt-Uchida
If you don't have a Sam handy, connect with a scientist digitally with iNaturalist NZ app or website.
To use iNaturalist NZ, either visit their website (www.inaturalist.nz) or download the mobile app.
More about iNaturalist.nz...
"iNaturalist NZ — Mātaki Taiao is the New Zealand community inside the global iNaturalist network. All observations you make on iNaturalist NZ simultaneously become part of iNaturalist.org. You get all the world's naturalists looking at your hard to identify plants and creatures and we share all of New Zealand nature with the world. It's an amazing mutualism."
To start out on iNaturalist you can check out this page...
