By day, Simon Fearn is the Collection Officer - Natural Sciences for the
Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston. But in his spare
time, he is compelled to indulge a consuming passion for anything vaguely
‘creepy-crawly’. Here he documents, in a process that may well have been
therapeutic for him, the amazing history of an extraordinary insect.
B
efore my interest in reptiles came to the fore, I
was a kid obsessed with insects and spiders,
and I began an insect collection at a very early
age. I quickly developed a desire to understand
the life cycles and ecology of the insects that I was
finding, but back in the early 1970s there was not
a great deal of information. At around this time the
first edition of ‘The insects of Australia’ was
published by the CSIRO and it became my bible.
This allowed me to identify and classify many of
the insects I was finding, but there were still
numerous ecological questions left unanswered.
There was nothing for it but to attempt to find
answers myself, so I began rearing insects from
the caterpillars and grubs I found and kept detailed
notebooks of my discoveries. I became especially
interested in wood-boring
beetles and moths,
particularly longicorn bee-
tles (family Cerambycidae)
and wood moths (family
Cossidae), and I became
consumed with working
out life cycles and how to
collect perfect specimens in these groups.
of my life, in 1974, that a chance encounter with an
old copy of The National Geographic Magazine in
the school library completely blew my mind.
Flipping through the May 1959 edition I came upon
a life-size depiction of a prionid longicorn beetle (on
page 659), along with a huge grub which blanketed
the page. The accompanying article was entitled
‘Giant insects of the Amazon’, by Paul A. Zahl, and
it was my first introduction to the world's biggest
insect - the aptly named Titanus giganteus. The
article was a fabulous mix of travel and adventure
interspersed with the collection of giant exotic bugs,
and I read it over and over again for months after-
wards, as well as snapping up copies of the
magazine in antique and second-hand shops. Zahl's
article painted a romantic
picture of Titanus as an
almost mythical creature -
sought after by collectors
for over 100 years but with
only a handful of
specimens known to
science. Prior to his 1957
expedition to the Amazon, sponsored by National
Geographic, only a few museum specimens of
Titanus existed, and the then curator of insects and
spiders at the American Museum of Natural history,
Dr C. H. Curran, informed Zahl that, “Our own
museum contains more specimens of elephants
than all the museums of the world do of this beetle.”
“Our own museum contains
more specimens of elephants
that all the museums of the
world do of this beetle.”
Many hours spent in the bush at a young age
allowed me to eventually publish some detailed
accounts of the life histories of some of my favourite
insects in my native Tasmania. One group that I
became particularly obsessed with was the big
longicorn beetles in the subfamily Prioninae. There
were several reasons for this, apart from their size. I
grew up in urban Launceston where the two biggest
species in this group were rare or absent. The
Banksia Longhorn Beetle (Paroplites australis) is
most common in coastal woodland and a second
species without a common name (Toxeutes
arcuatus) is primarily an inhabitant of tall, wet
sclerophyll forest. Both these beetles are abundant
but have just limited adult emergence periods in mid
-summer, and because I could only be an infrequent
visitor to their core habitat, every encounter was
cause for excitement. The family shack was deep in
Paroplites territory and some relations owned a
farm in core Toxeutes habitat. Both these beetles
exceed 50mm in length and both are nocturnal, so
on rare summer visits to both locations I could
invariably be found checking outside lights at night,
in the hope of locating my quarry. I spent a lot of
time investigating the larval cycles of these beetles,
chopping their big white grubs out of trees and logs
and rearing them at home. It was during this period
Zahl timed his visit to northern Brazil to coincide
with the start of the wet season, when the majority
of insects are at their peak of activity. Although he
collected a wide variety of insects, he only obtained
one living Titanus, principally because the wet
season was late that year and he had to return to
his New York home before the main emergence
period. Before he left Brazil, Zahl had recruited the
assistance of employees at an American-backed
manganese mine established in virgin forest at
Serra do Navio to collect and mail to him any
Titanus they discovered once the rainy season got
well under way. A month later, he received a
wooden box in the mail and stated, "My wife and
two children gathered round, nearly as breathless
as I. The smell of naphthalene filled the room as I
detached the lid and carefully pulled away pad after
pad of packing tissue. Finally, there they were - 15
enormous, shiny specimens of Titanus giganteus -
to me the most beautiful sight in all the world.”