An Otago prison-designed and built weta house now has an additional use, thousands of miles from New Zealand — as a trap for invasive lizards.
A researcher from one of Japan’s oldest private universities contacted the Otago Correctional Facility late last year after seeing the weta houses, designed at the prison and made during the past two years by prisoners training in carpentry. Assistant Prof Naho Mitani, from the Department of Bioenvironmental and Agricultural Engineering College of Bioresource Sciences at Nihon University, was keen to try using the houses to trap an invasive lizard species in the Ogasawara Islands, 1000km south of Tokyo. The Ogasawara Islands, an isolated chain of 30 tropical and subtropical islands, are often called the Galapagos of the Orient. They were recognised as a Unesco World Heritage site in 2011.
Since the green anole, also known as the Carolina anole, was first seen in the islands in the 1960s, the species had reproduced and spread to such an extent that local insect populations had been severely affected. The lizards had been directly implicated in the demise of five endemic dragonfly species, a blue Lycaenid butterfly, an endemic cicada and a long-horned beetle.
The green anole has been listed as in invasive alien species in Japan since June 2005. In New Zealand, volunteers placed the weta houses on Doc tracks to provide living and breeding spaces for weta and to educate visitors about the importance of safeguarding native fauna, so OCF industries manager Wayne Young was surprised when the prison received an approach from another country to use the houses for another species.
But they were "very keen" to help out.
Assistant Prof Mitani asked a colleague on Ogasawara to use a weta house in a field trial to see if it could attract the invasive lizard.
"Last week, my colleague said they put the weta house on a dilapidated trash bin and, the next day, they found an anole lizard in the weta house."
It was winter in Japan at present which was "not a great season for further control experiments on the lizard", Assistant Prof Mitani said.
The experiments would continue during the northern hemisphere summer.
