WILD GRYLLOBLATTAS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 762, 7 September 1929, Page 32

WILD GRYLLOBLATTAS

WOMEN SCIENTISTS' SEARCH

ICE AGE SURVIVAL A hunting party in search of the rare and elusive Grylloblatta has left Banff, Alberta, for Moraine Lake, in Canada. The quarry is the great-great-great-grandfather of the cricket and cockroach, who lived during the Ice Age, and the hunters are Miss Marjory Ford, of the “Y” National Council, Ottawa, Miss B. Hamilton, lecturer at Toronto University, and Miss Abidh, an East Indian student at Toronto University’. The Grylloblatta is a primitive and abnormal form of insect life that survived and adapted itself to the Ice Age when the continent was buried beneath glaciers. Upon mossy logs at the foot of the glaciers it has lived ever since, and today its haunts are about Moraine Lake, whose beautiful glacier is one of the attractions of the Rockies.

It dies of heat if exposed to a temperature higher than 10 degrees above freezing, and thrives in sub-zero weather. To be preserved alive it must be taken away in pans of cracked Ice and kept in a refrigerator. The peculiar habits of this insect were discovered by Dr. Norma Ford, of Toronto University, and the insect itself was first found by Dr. F. M. Walker, of Toronto, some years ago upon Sulphur Mountain, near Banff, Alberta. There are few specimens in existence, and Moraine Lake is one of two or three places in the world where they can be found.