ISSUE #20: Year of Bugstack, and My Favorite Bug Article I’ve Ever Read

A thank you, and a present.

Normally the even issues of Bugstack are for paid subscribers only, but this one is free! Merry Christmas!

If you’re reading this, congratulations! You’ve made it through another calendar year, and you did it while reading Bugstack. It’s been five months since I launched this blog in late July, and this is the twentieth post on the site. Wow! Most websites don’t even have twenty posts exclusively about bugs, and that’s what makes Bugstack so special. 

In the spirit of the season, I want to give you a gift. 

The gift is another article, which is a convenient way for me to not have to exert myself too much at the end of the year. It’s the first piece I ever read that made me realize writing about this stuff (bugs) could be a viable career option, that making people care about something they might otherwise disregard was a very important thing to do. Everything I do I do in the hopes of one day coming close to the feeling this article brings me every time I read it. 

The Article In Question is this piece from NPR, written by Frontline correspondent and former Radiolab co-host Robert Krulwich. It’s about the Lord Howe Island stick insect, a phasmid by the name of Dryococelus australis, a shiny, beefy member of the sick insect family that scientists believed was extinct for 80 years. 

Here is the story: The Lord Howe Island stick insect lived on Lord Howe Island, a small island in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, until 1918, when the supply ship SS Makambo ran aground offshore and introduced its population of European rats. The rats proliferated, and in two years (two years!!) there was not a single stick insect to be found. The species was thought to be gone completely until 1964, when a group of climbers scaling Ball’s Pyramid, a large rock offshore of Lord Howe Island, discovered the remains of a dead one on the ground. In 2001, a team of Australian scientists found them living underneath a bush clinging to the rock face. There were just 24, but they were alive. 

Organisms like this are known as a “Lazarus taxon,” a term used in conservation for species that were once thought extinct that suddenly reappear years later, none the worse for wear. A few years after the living bugs were found, another research team spirited away two pairs for breeding. They donated one male and one female to the Melbourne Zoo, which has successfully bred an insurance population numbering in the thousands, sending specimens to three more zoos around the world to continue the experiment. A mass eradication project was planned for Lord Howe Island in 2018 to kill its population of rodent predators, which also threatened a number of native bird species as well as other insects. 

This piece, its dramatization of an unbelievable success story and its care taken to describe a creature that would otherwise seem disgusting and scary, makes me cry every time I open it, which I do about once a year. I won’t go into too much more detail because I want you to actually read the article, but I will mention one more thing. During its breeding program, the Melbourne Zoo observed that the insects pair off, which bugs don’t normally do. Patrick Honan, a member of the zoo’s conservation program, described to Jane Goodall during one of her visits how the mated adults sleep curled around each other. I can’t help but imagine them huddled on that windy rock, waiting out the decades, holding onto one another in secret until we were ready to find them again. 

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from Bugstack, another year we’ve been privileged to share with the Lord Howe Island stick insect.