New Zealand's giant wētāpunga insect rebounds after 15-year breeding effort

A paper in the New Zealand Journal of Zoology, highlighted internationally on 10 October 2026, describes one of the most ambitious invertebrate conservation projects ever attempted. Over 15 years, Butterfly Creek and Auckland Zoo bred tens of thousands of wētāpunga - a cricket-like insect endemic to New Zealand that can weigh as much as a sparrow - and released roughly 11,000 of them across 45 translocations to 10 new wild sites, mostly on predator-free offshore islands. Butterfly Creek developed the early husbandry techniques; Auckland Zoo scaled them up, raising the giant insects in communal 'creches' that mimicked natural crowding. The species' official conservation status has improved from Threatened - Nationally Endangered in 2004, when the programme began, to Threatened - Nationally Increasing in 2022. Lessons from the programme are now being used to try to save another at-risk species, the Māhoenui giant wētā. The story, promoted by New Zealand's Department of Conservation and picked up by BBC-style wildlife outlets, Earth.com and TVNZ's 1News, was one of the day's most-read conservation good-news stories.