{"id":69597,"date":"2025-02-21T04:01:15","date_gmt":"2025-02-20T19:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2025\/feb\/20\/velvet-worm-new-zealand-bug-of-the-year-winner"},"modified":"2025-02-21T04:01:15","modified_gmt":"2025-02-20T19:01:15","slug":"worm-like-creature-with-dark-secret-wins-new-zealand-bug-of-the-year-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=69597","title":{"rendered":"Worm-like creature with \u2018dark secret\u2019 wins New Zealand bug of the year award"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Velvet worms have rows of pudgy legs, skin speckled like a galaxy and dissolve their prey with sticky goo <\/p>\n<p>An ancient gummy-looking worm-like creature with a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/environment\/2025\/feb\/17\/tree-killing-beetle-found-to-be-attracted-to-britain-most-common-spruce\">vicious hunting method<\/a> that involves projecting sticky goo from its head has been crowned New Zealand\u2019s bug of the year.<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Peripatoides novaezealandiae<\/em> is from the family of velvet worms, or Ng\u0101okeoke in the M\u0101ori language. The invertebrates have rows of pudgy legs and skin speckled like a galaxy, and are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/business\/2025\/feb\/11\/it-wont-end-like-jurassic-park-that-was-a-movie-the-man-who-wants-to-bring-the-woolly-mammoth-back-to-life\">considered \u201cliving fossils\u201d<\/a>, having remained virtually unchanged for 500m years.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2025\/feb\/20\/velvet-worm-new-zealand-bug-of-the-year-winner\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Velvet worms have rows of pudgy legs, skin speckled like a galaxy and dissolve their prey with sticky goo An ancient gummy-looking worm-like creature with a vicious hunting method that involves projecting sticky goo from its head has been crowned New Z&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2286,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[41,65,56,94,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific","category-environment","category-new-zealand","category-wildlife","category-world-news"],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2286"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69597"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69598,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69597\/revisions\/69598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}