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The Sticky Stick Insects of Lord Howe Island

That’s Ball’s Pyramid, a dormant volcanic spire off the coast of Australia’s Lord Howe Island, and yes, it’s a real place. It’s a starkly beautiful place, and it’s home to this enormous insect, the “tree lobster” (aptly named, because holy crap):

Those insects live under a single bush on the edge of a single cliff on a lonely crescent of rock in the South Pacific. How in the world did that happen?

They used to live all over Lord Howe Island, the larger neighboring land mass, until a ship ran aground there in 1918. In the process, a handful of rats swam ashore and turned the island into a stick insect-eating buffet/mating playground. In short, the tree lobster was wiped out, extinct, kaput, finished. Or so they thought …

In 2001, a team of climbers ascended the face of Ball’s Pyramid, looked in the rocky soil beneath a lonely, windswept bush, and found a couple dozen tree lobsters, alive and well! How did they get there? The best guess is that they hitched an airborne ride on some nesting material brought to the cliff faces by birds that inhabit the Pyramid. A couple of them landed beneath that bush, and the rest is history. A lonely, 80 year history.

Later this month, Bespoke Animation will be releasing a short animated film about this bug-gone-missing story titled Sticky (and they could use some help crossing over the finish line on their funding, so if you’d like to help check here). Here’s the trailer, which looks simply wonderful:

Captive breeding of the insects has commenced, and once the rat problem on Lord Howe Island is under control scientists hope to reintroduce them to their native habitat. It’s an extinction story with a happy ending! For more on Ball’s Pyramid tree lobsters, check out this Robert Krulwich story, or this feature from Becky Crew. And you definitely want to see a video of one of these guys hatching from its egg … wow!