Scientists from the Australian Museum traveled to Lord Howe Island in the late 19th century. They found a type of insect under a log.
Panesthia lata is the Lord Howe Island wood-feeding insect. It is thought that P. lata is a food source for the birds on the island.
Rats came to the island from a ship. In the late 20th century, it was assumed that P. lata had gone extinct due to rats.
Could it have survived on the island?
The final stage of the rat eradication program on the island was implemented in 2019.
We became interested in the biology of P. lata and the potential to re populate the island with this insect.
There were two small islands near Lord Howe Island where P. lata had been found.
Why would we want to bring back one of the most reviled creatures on the planet after they've been wiped out?
P. lata is cute and charismatic but doesn't want to go into people's houses. It is hidden in the forest and eats leaf litter and rotting wood at night.
The Australia Pacific Science Foundation gave us money to investigate the genetics and ecology of P. lata. Nicholas Carlile, an honors student in our lab at the University of Sydney, and Maxim Adams, an honors student in our lab at the University of Sydney, left for Lord Howe Island to begin the study.
They decided to look at potential sites on Lord Howe Island because bad weather prevented them from going to the island.
They went to a secluded area in the north of the island. The first rock they looked at was a small group of roaches. I was supposed to join them three days later, but they called me that afternoon to let me know they had good news.
They found a few others within a few meters under the same fig tree, but they couldn't find anything else on the island.
The Lord Howe Island population of roaches was different from the ones found on the other islands, and we carried out some preliminary tests to see if that was true.
The population may have hung on due to baiting. The baiting was done to help other species.
Historical museum samples from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and samples from Ball's Pyramid were collected by Dick Smith in the 1960s.
We hope to find out the relationship between the rediscovered population and those originally collected on the island a century or more ago. We want to find out the origins and evolution of P. lata.
There are more than 100 plant species found nowhere else on Earth and many more endemic animal species on the Lord Howe Island Group. The biology of many of these species is not well known.
The Lord Howe Island archipelago has several million years of evolution and we hope our use of DNA techniques will help to understand it.
Nathan lo is an associate professor in the school of biological sciences at the university.
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