The giant wood moth is the heaviest moth there is.
Nobody expects them to ever get as heavy as the one in this story, however.
Insects in Australia tend to be larger than you’ll find almost anywhere else. Even Australians were shocked by the size of this moth, however, and that’s coming from people who regularly see spiders the size of small dogs.
The school principal had never seen anything like this before.
Meagan Steward is the principal at Mount Cotton State School and she has grown accustomed to seeing wildlife on school grounds. She spoke to the media following the discovery of this giant wood moth, however, and noted that it was something nobody from the school had ever seen before.
Principal Steward said that they’ve seen all kinds of wildlife near the school but nothing like this giant moth.
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“We have a range of animals on our grounds at Mount Cotton State School, such as bush turkeys, wallabies, koalas, ducks, the occasional snake that needs to be relocated back to our rainforest, echidnas, tree frogs, possums, chickens and turtles,” she said to the Dodo. “But a giant wood moth was not something we had seen before.”
Construction workers spotted the moth.
The school was putting in an addition to a classroom that was located near the edge of a rainforest. Construction workers were brought in for the project and they are the ones that first discovered the giant moth.
They took photos of the giant insect and informed the school of what they had found.
No students or teachers were on the school grounds when the construction workers discovered the giant moth.
“We weren’t at school when the builders found the moth but they took some photos for us,” Principal Steward said.
Giant Wooden Moths the largest in the species. Non-monstrous giant wood moths can be pretty large. They can weigh as much as 6.6 pounds and have a wingspan as large as 10 inches.
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Males are only half the size of females, however, mainly due to the 20,000 eggs that they carry with them and deposit in the bark of trees. Larger female moths often have difficulty flying and will simply crawl up the sides of trees instead.
Dr. Christine Lambkin is the Queensland Museum’s head of entomology and she identified the moth to be of the giant wooden variety.
“They fly very, very poorly,” Dr. Lambkin said on radio.
“In most cases when the females emerge, they just crawl up a tree or stump of a fence post and wait for the males to find them.”
Giant moth used for a creative writing project.
When you are a middle school teacher and construction workers find a giant moth living on your school grounds, you make a project out of it. Principal Steward told the media that the teacher of the class that uses the new building gave her students a creative writing assignment based on the find.
“We have a (year) 4-5 composite class that live in that new building, and the teacher showed the students a picture of the giant moth and they used it as stimulus for a creative piece of writing,” Steward said to ABC Radio.
This creative writing project evidently involved the class writing a story that involved their teacher getting eaten by giant moths.
“The class brainstormed what could happen and they decided on a giant moth invasion,” Steward continued. “They wrote some very creative and imaginative pieces of writing, including Mrs Wilson (their teacher) getting eaten by the moths.”
Learn more about this giant wooden moth in the video below.
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