Ruud Kleinpaste: A short synopsis of the jobs Invertebrates hold

Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

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10d ago 3:22

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Just spent a week with 30 teachers in various environmental locations of Auckland. The Sir Peter Blake Trust do this every year under the umbrella of BLAKE Inspire.

Learning outside is part of the curriculum: water quality, Matauranga Māori, rockpools, school gardens (with pigs etc), climate change, StarDome, political policy simulation, corporate sustainability, and good, old nature nerd stuff in forests and reserves.

Often the question comes up: what good do Mosquitoes do? And beetles? And weta?, etc.

Those are also the questions I receive on talkback radio – makes sense?

Teachers can use this knowledge in the curriculum and hence create Nature Literate students.

We need those invertebrates (they really don’t need us!).

In fact, when it comes to bugs that “invade” our homes, it pays to remember that we built our homes right on top of theirs. They are pretty generous about that, really: nice house you built on top of mine – might just move in with you!

They find keratin (wool) and carpet beetles are the expert in recycling that stuff – been doing it for millions of years. That’s their job! No-one else can eat and digest keratin.

They find spilled spaghetti bolognese behind the stove: roaches have been recycling food waste and other organic materials for many, many millions of years! No worries – yum!

They find warm appliances on stand-by (TVs and Sky Boxes, amplifiers, etc). That means that microscopic moulds grow inside – enter booklice! They graze those moulds.

Some (tiger slugs) slither towards the cat bowl, where milk and biscuits are the basis of their human-house diet. In nature they clean up all sorts of random protein and old food items.

These are the caterpillars of the Indian Mealmoth. In our pantry they eat old, spilled muesli and in your garden shed they clean up mouldy slug and snail baits without any medical problems what-so-ever.

And there are many more “Jobs on the Planet” that are filled by Invertebrates, Fungi, Birds, and loads of organisms that literally run our planet

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