New infographic! Mating behaviour of a giant insect from New Zealand.

Note: the Maori are the Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Throughout this blog post, I use the Maori place and species names as much as possible to respect the history of this land and its peoples.

Have you ever heard of weta? Maybe the word sounds familiar if you’re a fan of sci-fi and special effects, because of the famous visual effects house Weta Workshop based in New Zealand (they did the effects for Lord of the Rings!). Weta are giant cricket-like insects that are uniquely only found in Aotearoa/New Zealand. There are approximately 80 species of weta, and they live all sorts of different lifestyles - from long-legged, jumping cave weta (tokoriro) to slow-moving, veggie-crunching giant weta (weta punga), they have adapted to just about every environment available to them in Aotearoa.

The latest infographic from Wapiti Studios helps to explain a recent study on the Wellington tree weta, which is a species of tree-dwelling weta called putangatanga. This study looked at a phenomenon called polyandry: females mating with multiple males. In animal behavioural studies, there has been a lot of research examining why males mate with multiple females (think of lions, with the maned males having a pride of females), but much less on why females mate with multiple males. In fact, the research community was not really aware that female multiple mating was a thing until relatively recently!

There are a lot of unanswered questions in the field of polyandry research, including how widespread polyandry is and whether it translates to “benefits.” In the animal biology world, “benefits” means “more or better offspring!” So, this study asked: do female Wellington tree weta have multiple mates? And if so, does that result in more or better offspring?

Check out the study results in the infographic below!