Collecting rare bugs can be child's play, writes Ellen Sima, for Otago Museum.
When 8-year-old Jamie Morris, of Dunedin, found a bat-winged fly, his story went global and was published in local, national and international newspapers, and even featured in New Scientist magazine.
Jamie had been in the right place at the right time to collect a fantastic example of one of the world's rarest and most unusual flies.
During the last few days of 1988, Jamie was camping with his family in a steep valley edged by the sheer Fiordland mountains.
One morning, while watching the local kea around the eastern portal of Homer Tunnel leading to Milford Sound, he saw a strange-looking fly basking on a rock, its wings outstretched in the sunlight.
The fly had a black body and a pair of large, dark, rounded wings, similar in both shape and size to the hindwings of a butterfly.
Dark colouring is typical of insects in the alpine zone, as it soaks up the maximum amount of warmth from the sun to combat changeable, often frigid temperatures.
Jamie showed the fly to his dad - wildlife photographer Rod Morris - who had never seen this strange species before.
The family photographed and collected the fly and passed it along to Otago Museum invertebrate zoologist Anthony Harris for identification.
He confirmed it was the rare New Zealand bat-winged fly, Exsul singularis, whose life cycle was all but unknown to science.
Before Jamie's find, the museum had just one specimen of bat-winged fly, which was collected in 1941.
This wasn't the first case of a local child making an important bug discovery. On October 21, 1962, 9-year-old Rachel Coxhead was exploring Long Beach.
She turned over a rotten log to find a sleek black spider with an orange stripe down its abdomen, carrying a full egg sac.
She showed the spider to her father, who put it in a matchbox and took it into the museum for identification.
Rachel's find turned out to be New Zealand's only endemic poisonous spider, the katipo, which means ''night-stinger'' in Maori.
While fairly common further north, the katipo was not normally seen much further south than Timaru.
Rachel's specimen was the southernmost katipo found, and led Otago Museum spider authority Raymond Forster to suggest this species was probably more common around Dunedin's beaches than previously thought.
No other katipo specimens were found further south than Dunedin, making Rachel's discovery an important piece of evidence in its known distribution.
Today, both the bat-winged fly and katipo are rare members of New Zealand's native fauna.
Jamie and Rachel's discoveries mark important milestones in our understanding of these species.
Scientists estimate that 20,000 different species of bug call New Zealand home, but roughly 10,000 of these species still need to be named and described.
This huge unknown diversity means there are opportunities for new and exciting discoveries in the insect world.
Local children, with their sharp eyes and inquisitive minds, are as well-placed now as they have been in the past to make big contributions to our understanding of New Zealand bugs.
• Ellen Sima is natural science collection assistant at Otago Museum.
