Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, around two hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: five million years ago, if you had been walking through
Speaker 1: a Permian floodplain, you might have seen a griffin fly
Speaker 1: dragonfly like insect the size of a crow. It was huge,
Speaker 1: partly because atmospheric oxygen during this time was something like
Speaker 1: thirty it's down around today, And it turns out that
Speaker 1: the amount of oxygen present in the atmosphere is the
Speaker 1: limiting factor in how big a bug can get. Although
Speaker 1: we no longer have dragonflies flying around with two foot
Speaker 1: wingspans that's over half a meter, there are some standouts
Speaker 1: among modern insects. Take Wallace's giant b a taxonomical name
Speaker 1: Mega chile pluto. It's the world's largest B. Females of
Speaker 1: the species can grow up to the size of an
Speaker 1: adult humans thumb that's about one and a half inches
Speaker 1: long or nearly forty millimeters, with a wingspan of two
Speaker 1: and a half inches or over sixty millimeters. That's about
Speaker 1: five times the size of the European honeybees you're used
Speaker 1: to seeing. The females also have large mandibles used for
Speaker 1: scraping up tree resin to line their nests, but it
Speaker 1: was recently thought to have gone the way of the
Speaker 1: griffin fly. Nobody had seen Wallace's giant bee since nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty one, and before that no scientists had clapped eyes
Speaker 1: on it since its discovery in eighteen fifty eight by
Speaker 1: Alfred Russell Wallace, the English biologist who independently conceived of
Speaker 1: the theory of evolution through natural selection at the same
Speaker 1: time as Charles Darwin. Of course, researchers knew this didn't
Speaker 1: necessarily mean it was extinct. It's just very difficult to
Speaker 1: prove that an organism exists if you can't find it alive.
Speaker 1: But in January of twenty nineteen, a team of researchers
Speaker 1: traveled to a collection of little islands in Indonesia called
Speaker 1: the North Malaccas, and they found this be beheemoth nesting
Speaker 1: in a termite nest on a tree trunk. Clay Bolt,
Speaker 1: a natural history photographer who captured the first photos and
Speaker 1: video of a live giant bee, said in a press release,
Speaker 1: to actually see how beautiful and big the species is
Speaker 1: in life, to hear the sound of its giant wings
Speaker 1: thrumming as it flew past my head was just incredible.
Speaker 1: Over the years, a few research expeditions had set out
Speaker 1: to find Wallace's Giant bee, but they came up empty handed.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, however, specimens would show up for sale.
Speaker 1: One appeared on eBay in the auction for nine thousand
Speaker 1: one dollars. In case you were wondering, that's more than
Speaker 1: what the corpse of an insect usually goes for. The
Speaker 1: exact island on which the bee was found is a
Speaker 1: secret because the researchers fear that if they published that information,
Speaker 1: the remaining Wallace's Giant bees might not be long for
Speaker 1: this world given that type of auction price tag. Since
Speaker 1: the bee has only been viewed a few times in
Speaker 1: the wild, not much is known about its habits in
Speaker 1: life history, other than that it seems to like to
Speaker 1: live in termite nests in lowland forest areas. Indonesia lost
Speaker 1: fift of its tree cover between two thousand one seventeen
Speaker 1: to make way for agricultural fields, So our rekindled romance
Speaker 1: with Wallace's Giant b might not last long if conservation
Speaker 1: efforts aren't put in place soon. But in the meantime,
Speaker 1: it's nice to know that Wallace's Giant B is still
Speaker 1: buzzing through the forest like a tiny helicopter the giant
Speaker 1: griffin flies of the Permian. Shirley would have wanted it
Speaker 1: that way. Today's episode is based on the article Wallace's
Speaker 1: Giant B World's largest Rediscovered on house to forks dot com,
Speaker 1: written by Jesslin Shields. Brain Stuff is a production of
Speaker 1: by Heart Radio in partnership with house toworks dot com,
Speaker 1: and it is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts
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