Dr Morgane Merien introduces Our Insect Neighbours

Crawling, flitting, hopping or climbing – our insect neighbours get around! Visit Our Insect Neighbours exhibition and see all sorts of wondrous critters and learn something new. The exhibition is on until 17 May 2026 at Te Pito Huarewa Gallery, Tuakiri | Identity, Level 2, Tūranga.

Our Insect Neighbours is a collaborative exhibition, brought to you by Christchurch City Libraries and the Canterbury Museum.

Meet the Mini-Beasts this week

Meet the mini-beasts and explore the incredible world of insects up close with real display cases and live stick insects. Canterbury Museum educators will be on hand to share their knowledge and answer your curious questions.

• Monday 13 April 10.30am to 12.30pm at Tūranga
• Tuesday 14 April 10,30am to 12.30pm at Redwood Library
• Wednesday 15 April 10,30am to 12.30pm at Te Hāpua: Halswell Centre
• Thursday 16 April 10,30am to 12.30pm at Linwood Library at Eastgate

Dr Morgane Merien

Dr Morgane Merien is an entomologist, and a science communicator from Canterbury Museum. Dr Morgane kindly introduces us to the exhibition and some of our insect neighbours who star in it. 

All about entomology

Pinning the insects

So before you see the finished insects and the cases all beautiful and pretty, this is what happens first. First you need to pin them in the position that you want. So that's why it kind of looks like a little forest of pins. Then you let them dry like this for a few weeks. Then once that happens, you can remove all the pins except one pin that's through the body. And then on that pin, that's where you will add all the labels that has all the information about the insect. Where you collected it, how you collected it, who collected it, when you collected it. That information is very very important for collections because they tell us all that we need to know about those populations of insects, maybe if they are still around in a hundred years, you know, very very crucial information for science.

Meet some insects

Stick insects

So, this is a stick insect. We've got around 23 species of stick insects in New Zealand.  This is probably one of our most common. This is Acanthoxyla inermis, the unarmed stick insect. This is a adult female. In this species, and the different colours just allow them to match different parts of their environment there's only girls, no boys at all.

They reproduce asexually by a mode of reproduction called pathogenesis. And they're  pretty pretty cool. They can be brown like this or green. They're all part of the same species and also makes it harder for predators to be able to see them and find them in the wild.

Giraffe Weevils

So, these two right here are the giraffe weevils. This is the male, and this is the female. And you might notice that they look very different from one another. The male has a very, very long nose, and that's because they use those to fight one another. The male with the longest nose usually wins and then gets access to the female and other resources.

However, there is an alternative strategy. We have sneaker males. And so, those are males that are very, very small. They kind of look like the females. And what they do is that when this male is standing guard over the female, the sneaker male will go underneath that and mate with the female right under his nose.

Violin Beetle

This one here is a violin beetle. So cool because the shape looks like a violin. And so they are really, really flat, really flattened body. And that allows them to kind of get within crevices, a bark of trees, and be able to hide away. They also very much look like massive seeds in tropical forest that you would find. So it helps with their camouflage.

Alpine Tiger Moth

Nine and 10 in this case are the alpine tiger moth and nine is actually the male and 10 is the female. And you may notice that they look vastly different. The females are completely wingless. They stay in this kind of little weird cocoon. Actually the males will mate with the females through this cocoon. They'll lay their eggs. The eggs will hatch into caterpillars and actually eat the body of the mum.

Malayan jungle nymph

For this case, you've got the mantises, the leaf insects, and the stick insects.  I love them all. This is probably some of my favourite groups of insects. I particularly like the Malayan jungle nymph because I've actually held one before.  

They're so heavy and they actually hiss at you when they feel threatened. They've got kind of  tiny little wings that they can't really use to fly, but they will pop them open and hiss. Crazy.

More videos

Playlist (YouTube Shorts)

More about Dr Morgane Merien

• Visit Morgan's website
• Follow @bughuntermorgane on Instagram
• Watch Morgane's show Bug Hunter on TVNZ on demand

More about Our Insect Neighbours exhibition

• Visit the exhibition page
• Look at exhibition photos

Hoake ki te Taiao City Nature Challenge