the great moa

Saw this nasty little customer trundling up the front path as I was loading up my last truckload of stuff to move to the new house. I’ve never seen an insect this large in Saskatchewan before, the largest up until now being those gigantic water beetles you sometimes come across. This guy was about the length of my index finger, and about as wide as my index and middle fingers side by side. It’s hard to tell how big it is from the video, but it got a bit aggressive when I tried to put my hand near it for scale, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

I was curios to know what the heck it was— at first I thought it might be some sort of cockroach— but I’d never seen a cockroach with such beefy forelimbs. After a little googling, I found out that it’s one of these, known locally as a South-Saskatchewan Toe-Biter, for obvious reasons:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethocerus

Needless to say, I made damn sure it didn’t get into any of my stuff. I’d hate to wake up in the middle of the night with this thing camping out on my face. Yuck.