Walking Stick Recovery

NPR: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway
by ROBERT KRULWICH  February 29, 2012

by Robert Krulwich

"No, this isn't a make-believe place. It's real.Ball's Pyramid in the Tasman sea is located 19 kilometers from Lord Howe Island east of Australia.

They call it "Ball's Pyramid." It's what's left of an old volcano that emerged from the sea about 7 million years ago. A British naval officer named Ball was the first European to see it in 1788. It sits off Australia, in the South Pacific. It is extremely narrow, 1,844 feet high, and it sits alone.

What's more, for years this place had a secret. At 225 feet above sea level, hanging on the rock surface, there is a small, spindly little bush, and under that bush, a few years ago, two climbers, working in the dark, found something totally improbable hiding in the soil below. How it got there, we still don't know.

Here's the story: About 13 miles from this spindle of rock, there's a bigger island, called Lord Howe Island.
On Lord Howe, there used to be an insect, famous for being big. It's a stick insect, a critter that masquerades as a piece of wood, and the Lord Howe Island version was so large — as big as a human hand — that the Europeans labeled it a "tree lobster" because of its size and hard, lobsterlike exoskeleton. It was 12 centimeters long and the heaviest flightless stick insect in the world. Local fishermen used to put them on fishing hooks and use them as bait"



Lord Howe Island Stick Insect hatching from Zoos Victoria on Vimeo.

project page for the conservation of teh stick insect

Lord Howe Island Stick Insect
Zoo Victoria