Comments on: Tree Lobsters!!

By: Daily Science Dose » Blog Archive » The Mysterious Case of the Lord Howe Island Tree Lobster

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 05:36:03 +0000

[...] lobsters side by side with another distant relative, a typical stick bug (my infinite thanks to Bug Girl’s Blog for the link to the German site where I got these images). Credit: Michael Whiting/Thomas Reischig [...]

By: Tree Lobsters, crawling crustaceans of the forest canopy « raincoaster

Tree Lobsters, crawling crustaceans of the forest canopy « raincoaster — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:33:07 +0000

[...] The Tree Lobsters of New Guinea. [...]

By: raincoaster

raincoaster — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 17:35:29 +0000

Those things are freaky. Remind me never go to go New Guinea. Once the world learned of the endangered Tree Octopus, however, it was only a matter of time before the other secrets of the forest canopy were revealed.

By: Bug Girl

Bug Girl — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:32:52 +0000

Thanks for the tip on the article!

By: DougT

DougT — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:30:03 +0000

I always heard of these referred to as land lobsters rather than tree lobsters. This is my all-time favorite invert conservation story. There is a captive breeding program, and preliminary plans for rat eradication on Lord Howe Island are afoot. New Scientist" did a nice article (subscription required) on the species a couple of years ago.

By: Gene

Gene — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 01:50:04 +0000

Wow! Maybe someone could start a captive breeding program for these critters. Loads of people breed and keep them in captivity. Captive breeding has worked pretty well for tarantulas.

By: Stonehead

Stonehead — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:10:58 +0000

Either that or start farming them for supply to trendy restaurants. Anyway for tree lobster thermidor?

More seriously, one of my favourites is Megacrania batesii, found in the Daintree region of Queensland, Australia. They’re not the biggest, but they are gorgeous looking insects and they squirt “peppermint” when threatened.

Another Australian one is ctenomorpha gargantua. It’s been photographed twice, by non-experts who didn’t realise what they’d found, but never studied. The one photographed in 1998 was 615mm (24in) long!