Aotearoa's Museums and the Oddly Sexy Snails Contained Within

 

Display text reads: "Pupurangi pride. These giant flesh eating snails are as unique to Aotearoa as kiwi, but with a perhaps understandably lower profile.  They feast on invertebrates like earthworms and grow huge - the largest specimens weigh as much as a tui.  In prehistoric Aotearoa their main predator was the weka, but now possums, rats, pigs, and even hedgehogs hunt them out for a protein-rich snack."

Listen to this unexpectedly spicy narration from the Auckland Museum's wonderful Queerseum tour, where you get to know a lot about snail sex--you didn't even know what you didn't know about snail sex.  I strongly urge you to listen to this audio clip, because if you don't you will be missing the context for the phrase "emerging like a windsock from my well-lubed foot."

From Te Papa in Wellington: Super-sucky snails. These giant meat eaters can suck up whole earthworms like spaghetti, using their rasping niho, teeth. Pupu rangi (tauira) - Giant land snails.

Museum-life isn't exclusively snails, though.  There is tons of excellent bird taxidermy such as these pettable kiwi birds:

Smiling!

Maybe that smile is from a runner's high.

Not all taxidermy is a great successes, though.

This is a kuri, a dog breed brought by the Polynesians along with sweet potatoes and gourds when they landed on New Zealand.  This is a rare specimen of that early breed that survives in Te Papa, the national museum.  It has... seen better days?  

It could be worse, right? There has to be a way this could be worse.

Maybe worse would be the distortion and discoloration that comes from suspension in a jar of formaldehyde.

A short nosed bat on the left is a specimen of a now-extinct species that used to flutter on the South Island.

This was a collection designed to appeal to me, personally, from the Rakiura Museum.