I want to visit a South Pacific Island
Venture inland on a high volcanic South Pacific island, and you enter a world that appears to be built around absence, but the biodiversity can be vast: Almost no native land mammals, which means that birds, reptiles, and insects have expanded to fill the niches that foxes, badgers, and deer occupy elsewhere. Flying foxes, the size of dogs, and fruit bats the size of small cats, hang from the canopy by day and reign over pollination and seed dispersal at night. Kingfishers and lorikeets work the branches below. Geckos and skinks patrol the detrital undergrowth. A large flying fox bat. The most astonishing resident to me is the coconut crab, the largest land invertebrate on Earth. It climbs trees, cracks open coconuts with its claws, and can live for sixty years. If you see one moving through the forest at night, you might wonder what planet you are on. This is planet Earth. Coconut crab hanging out on a garbage can. On an atoll, the interior shrinks to almost nothing, a narr...