February 14, 2001

1 min read

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Long Lost Stick Insect Found

By Kate Wong

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Some 370 miles off Australia's east coast, in the Lord Howe Island Group, researchers have discovered a creature long thought to be extinct--a stick insect known as Dryococelus australis. Although these wingless beasts once populated Lord Howe island in large numbers, rats accidentally introduced after a shipwreck in 1918 killed them off. A few of them, however, appear to have survived.

Scientists from the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service found a trio of these walking sticks and a number of eggs in a single bush on Balls Pyramid, a rocky outcrop about 10 miles south of Lord Howe. The shiny, reddish-brown insects, which measure six inches long and about half-an-inch wide, dwell in damp rocky crevices by day and come out at night to feed.

"The thrill of seeing these long-lost animals," Australian scientist Nicholas Carlile told Reuters, "made us feel like we had been transported back to another time when they once dominated the night-time forests of this magical group of islands."

Kate Wong is an award-winning science writer and senior editor for features at Scientific American, where she has focused on evolution, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology and animal behavior. She is fascinated by human origins, which she has covered for nearly 30 years. Recently she has become obsessed with birds. Her reporting has taken her to caves in France and Croatia that Neandertals once called home to the shores of Kenya’s Lake Turkana in search of the oldest stone tools in the world, as well as to Madagascar on an expedition to unearth ancient mammals and dinosaurs, the icy waters of Antarctica, where humpback whales feast on krill, and a “Big Day” race around the state of Connecticut to find as many bird species as possible in 24 hours. Wong is co-author, with Donald Johanson, of Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins. She holds a bachelor of science degree in biological anthropology and zoology from the University of Michigan. Follow her on Bluesky @katewong.bsky.social

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