NATURE NOTES

Taupo Times, Volume I, Issue 33, 27 August 1952, Page 1

NATURE NOTES

AN ORCHID AND AN INSECT

(By

H. H.)

Before leaving the ceiebrated collecting- grov.nd of Cpcpo I should lefer to the last parasite to be collected there, an ORCHID technically called GASTRODIA CUNNINGHAM. I regret the use of scientiffic names but in this instance it is necessary. This is quite a rare sort of orchid, three to four feet in -height used in earlier years as a source oi food for the Maori and very much relished if my informant be correct. They are brown, leafless, whose tuberous roots are parasitic on the roots of other plants. | It has a long brown flower, with | stalk striped or spotted with purple and from which hang dirty green flowers which smeil like manure. Jt is found only in dense bush pnd grows in dark damp places. Strange to add this is the only parasitic plant {cnown to the Chatham Islands. The Maori name is PEREI and also RUPEREI and it flowers from December to February. A Strange Creature. And now comes my last item of interest that concerns us at Opepe. I refer to the creature, the PERIPATUS Novae Zealandiae, a strange creature, the ancestral form of all insects and Spiders and as the Tuatara is to the animal world, so the Peripatus is to the insect world. It in found also in Chile, the West Indies ,and the Cape of Good Hope. This strange little creature, about II inches long, is of olive-green and black colour, with a host of legs and practically inanmate and lifeless. It exudes much milk when touched, and I used to excite the little animal before immersing it in alcohol to stop cloudiness. It is a caterpiiiar worm-like Arthroped, breathing with the airtubes of an insect and getting rid of its waste products with the kidneys of a worm. It coiild be called a surviving ancestor of the literal father of flies. In Rememberance. And now I must bid fai'ewell to

Opepe where on the beautiful morning of IMay 22ndi, 1944 in association with the late Mr Leonard Grey and "old ontemptible" of the? First Great War, I grew 200 daffodils \around the hallowed graves of the men who had griven their young lives for Empire and as an earnest of friendship with their kith and kin of England, Sotland, ? Ireland, and Wales — those young lives given a remote corner of the Empire of Rritain. .