The Lord Howe Island stick insect: "Extinction of INTEREST"!?
Wonders of nature never cease, and what will exist seems to find a way to endure even with being consumed out of existence. Such is the findings of a large stick insect once thought to of been extinct - The Lord Howe Island stick insect aka "Land Lobster".
According to Wikipedia: Dryococelus australis, commonly known as the Lord Howe Island stick insect or tree lobster, is a species of stick insect which lives on the Lord Howe Island Group. It was thought to be extinct by 1930, only to be rediscovered in 2001 (this phenomenon is known as the Lazarus effect). It is extinct in its largest habitat, Lord Howe Island, and has been called "the rarest insect in the world", as the rediscovered population consisted of 24 individuals living on the small islet of Ball's Pyramid. (More)
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Please find the following information related to the Lord Howe Island stick insect to be of use to you with coming to realize there is still so much we have not discovered on our little blue ball in the vast universe.
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| Land Lobster |
According to Wikipedia: Dryococelus australis, commonly known as the Lord Howe Island stick insect or tree lobster, is a species of stick insect which lives on the Lord Howe Island Group. It was thought to be extinct by 1930, only to be rediscovered in 2001 (this phenomenon is known as the Lazarus effect). It is extinct in its largest habitat, Lord Howe Island, and has been called "the rarest insect in the world", as the rediscovered population consisted of 24 individuals living on the small islet of Ball's Pyramid. (More)
Click the image below to find more details via
Please find the following information related to the Lord Howe Island stick insect to be of use to you with coming to realize there is still so much we have not discovered on our little blue ball in the vast universe.
Michael Love, IIO
Via
Back from the brink of extinction
03/04/13
The Lord Howe Island stick insect was thought to be
lost forever, until a tiny number was discovered on a rocky outcrop 23km
away from the island.
And via
Australian endangered species: Lord Howe Island stick insect
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| A breeding colony of Lord Howe Island Stick Insects was founded at Melbourne Zoo. AAP |
The Lord Howe Island stick insect (Dryococelus australis) or
“land lobster” is a large, flightless stick insect that was, until
recently, thought to be extinct. It has a glossy brownish-black
exoskeleton with some pale yellow markings where joints and body
segments meet.
Females reach over 150 mm in length, while the slightly smaller males
are characterised by strongly curved, spiny, muscular hind legs.
As the name suggests, this species was known only from Lord Howe
Island, a small volcanic island situated in the Tasman Sea some 800 km
north east of Sydney, Australia. It is nocturnal, feeding and moving
around only at night, and
sheltering in small tree hollows during the day. In 1916, Arthur Lea, a
well-known Australian entomologist, visited the island and described
seeing as many as 68 stick insects in a single tree hollow.
Status
The Lord Howe Island stick insect is arguably the rarest insect in
the world. The species was abundant until sometime after 1918 when a
vessel, the “Makembo”, ran aground nearby
leading to the introduction of black rats (Rattus rattus) to Lord Howe Island. Within 30 years the stick insect was thought to be extinct due to predation.
In 1964 a group of climbers ventured onto the nearby island of Balls
Pyramid. This steep, rocky outcrop is situated approximately 23km south
east of Lord Howe Island and is virtually inaccessible. The adventurers
made landfall and were able to take some photographs, including one of a
recently dead Lord Howe Island stick insect.
No further exploration occurred until 2001 when a group of
researchers returned to Balls Pyramid and rediscovered living adults.
Today fewer than 30 adult stick insects remain on the Pyramid and the
species is recognised as “Critically Endangered” by the IUCN Red List.
Threats
The greatest threat to the survival of the Lord Howe Island stick
insect, and the cause of its extinction on the island, is the
introduction of the black rat. Rat numbers have since
been reduced but until rats are totally eradicated from Lord Howe Island
the stick insect will remain vulnerable and cannot be reintroduced.
The tiny population on Balls Pyramid faces a number of different
threats. This highly inaccessible island outcrop has very few areas of
suitable habitat for the remaining
population of stick insects. Only one species of food plant, Melaleuca howeana, grows on Balls Pyramid and it is at risk from environmental factors (such as drought, storms
and rock falls), and an invasive vine (Morning Glory, Ipomoea cairica)
that threatens to smother the few remaining plants. Poaching by private
collectors of this highly-prized stick insect and its eggs is also of
concern.
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| Balls Pyramid is the last refuge of the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect dracophylla/Flickr |
Strategy
The Critically Endangered population of stick insects remaining on
Balls Pyramid is protected as part of the Lord Howe Permanent Park
Preserve. Access to the Pyramid is carefully restricted and controlled
by the Lord Howe Island Board.
Removal of the invasive Morning Glory vine from the small area
occupied by the stick insects was successfully carried out in 2003.
Interestingly, whole-scale removal of the vine from the Pyramid was
discouraged as the vine is assisting with soil stabilisation on the
steeper outcrops.
Most importantly, a breeding population of Lord Howe Island stick insects has been established at the Melbourne Zoo
thus providing insurance against a second extinction event. It is hoped
that individuals from the breeding population will eventually be
reintroduced to Lord Howe Island, providing black rats can be
successfully eradicated from the island.
Conclusion
Rediscovery of the Lord Howe Island stick insect on Balls Pyramid
provides hope that other species thought to be extinct may persist
elsewhere. However, it is highly unlikely that other extinct Lord Howe
Island species will be found on nearby islands.
It is remarkable that the stick insect has been able to persist in
such an inhospitable habitat and in such low
numbers. However, like other species of stick insect the female Lord
Howe Island stick insect is able to reproduce without the presence of
males (a reproductive mode termed
“parthenogenesis”).
This means the population could be reduced to a single female stick
insect and survive. However, this is not a desirable option. Protecting
the remaining, vulnerable population of stick insects is still the best
approach.
Read more: A personal experience of breeding Lord Howe Island stick insects.
The Conversation is running a series on Australian endangered species. See it here
More via
Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides For 80 Years
No, this isn't a make-believe place. It's real.
But, hey, why don't you look for yourself?
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| Balls Pyramid: John White |
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.
 |
| A satellite view of Ball's Pyramid in the Tasman Sea off the eastern coast of Australia. |
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.
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| Rod Morris/http://www.rodmorris.co.nz |
Then one day in 1918, a supply ship, the S.S. Makambo from Britain,
ran aground at Lord Howe Island and had to be evacuated. One passenger
drowned. The rest were put ashore. It took nine days to repair the
Makambo, and during that time, some black rats managed to get from the
ship to the island, where they instantly discovered a delicious new rat
food: giant stick insects. Two years later, the rats were everywhere and
the tree lobsters were gone.
Totally gone. After 1920, there wasn't a single sighting. By 1960, the Lord Howe stick insect, Dryococelus australis, was presumed extinct.
There was a rumor, though.
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| Credit: Stephanie d'Otreppe |
Some climbers scaling Ball's Pyramid in the 1960s said they'd seen a
few stick insect corpses lying on the rocks that looked "recently dead."
But the species is nocturnal, and nobody wanted to scale the spire
hunting for bugs in the dark.
Climbing The Pyramid
Fast
forward to 2001, when two Australian scientists, David Priddel and
Nicholas Carlile, with two assistants, decided to take a closer look.
From the water, they'd seen a few patches of vegetation that just might
support walking sticks. So, they boated over. ("Swimming would have been
much easier," Carlile said, "but there are too many sharks.") They
crawled up the vertical rock face to about 500 feet, where they found a
few crickets, nothing special. But on their way down, on a precarious,
unstable rock surface, they saw a single melaleuca bush peeping out of a
crack and, underneath, what looked like fresh droppings of some large
insect.
Where, they wondered, did that poop come from?
The
only thing to do was to go back up after dark, with flashlights and
cameras, to see if the pooper would be out taking a nighttime walk. Nick
Carlile and a local ranger, Dean Hiscox, agreed to make the climb. And
with flashlights, they scaled the wall till they reached the plant, and
there, spread out on the bushy surface, were two enormous, shiny,
black-looking bodies. And below those two, slithering into the muck,
were more, and more ... 24 in all. All gathered near this one plant.
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| dryococelus-australis: Patrick Honan |
They were alive and, to Nick Carlile's eye, enormous. Looking at
them, he said, "It felt like stepping back into the Jurassic age, when
insects ruled the world."
They were Dryococelus australis. A
search the next morning, and two years later, concluded these are the
only ones on Ball's Pyramid, the last ones. They live there, and, as
best we know, nowhere else.
How they got there is a mystery.
Maybe they hitchhiked on birds, or traveled with fishermen, and how they
survived for so long on just a single patch of plants, nobody knows
either. The important thing, the scientists thought, was to get a few of
these insects protected and into a breeding program.
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| Patrick Honan/Nick Carlile |
That wasn't so easy. The Australian government didn't know if the
animals on Ball's Pyramid could or should be moved. There were meetings,
studies, two years passed, and finally officials agreed to allow four
animals to be retrieved. Just four.
When the team went back to
collect them, it turned out there had been a rock slide on the mountain,
and at first they feared that the whole population had been wiped out.
But when they got back up to the site, on Valentine's Day 2003, the
animals were still there, sitting on and around their bush.
The
plan was to take one pair and give it a man who was very familiar with
mainland walking stick insects, a private breeder living in Sydney. He
got his pair, but within two weeks, they died.
Adam And Eve And Patrick
That
left the other two. They were named "Adam" and "Eve," taken to the
Melbourne Zoo and placed with Patrick Honan, of the zoo's invertebrate
conservation breeding group. At first, everything went well. Eve began
laying little pea-shaped eggs, exactly as hoped. But then she got sick.
According to biologist Jane Goodall, :
"Eve became very, very sick. Patrick ... worked every night for a month desperately trying to cure her. ... Eventually, based on gut instinct, Patrick concocted a mixture that included calcium and nectar and fed it to his patient, drop by drop, as she lay curled up in his hand."
Her recovery was almost instant. Patrick ,
"She went from being on her back curled up in my hand, almost as good
as dead, to being up and walking around within a couple of hours."
Eve's
eggs were harvested, incubated (though it turns out only the first 30
were fertile) and became the foundation of the zoo's new population of
walking sticks.
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| Matthew Bulbert/The Australian Museum |
When Jane Goodall visited in 2008, Patrick showed her rows and rows
of incubating eggs: 11,376 at that time, with about 700 adults in the
captive population. Lord Howe Island walking sticks seem to pair off — —
and Goodall says Patrick "showed me photos of how they sleep at night,
in pairs, the male with three of his legs protectively over the female
beside him."
Now comes the question that bedevils all such
conservation rescue stories. Once a rare animal is safe at the zoo, when
can we release it back to the wild?
On Lord Howe Island, their
former habitat, the great-great-great-grandkids of those original black
rats are still out and about, presumably hungry and still a problem.
Step one, therefore, would be to mount an intensive (and expensive) rat
annihilation program. Residents would, no doubt, be happy to go
rat-free, but not every Lord Howe islander wants to make the
neighborhood safe for gigantic, hard-shell crawling insects. So the
Melbourne Museum is mulling over a public relations campaign to make
these insects more ... well, adorable, or noble, or whatever it takes.
They
recently made a video, with strumming guitars, featuring a brand new
baby emerging from its egg. The newborn is emerald green, squirmy and so
long, it just keeps coming and coming from an impossibly small
container. Will this soften the hearts of Lord Howe islanders? I dunno.
It's so ... so ... big.
But, hey, why don't you look for yourself?
What happens next? The story is simple: A bunch of black rats almost
wiped out a bunch of gigantic bugs on a little island far, far away from
most of us. A few dedicated scientists, passionate about biological
diversity, risked their lives to keep the bugs going. For the bugs to
get their homes and their future back doesn't depend on scientists
anymore. They've done their job. Now it's up to the folks on Lord Howe
Island.
Will ordinary Janes and Joes, going about their days,
agree to spend a little extra effort and money to preserve an animal
that isn't what most of us would call beautiful? Its main attraction is
that it has lived on the planet for a long time, and we have the power
to keep it around. I don't know if it will work, but in the end, that's
the walking stick's best argument:
I'm still here. Don't let me go.
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