ISSUE #31: Stick Insect With Beautiful Eyes Stuns In Peru

It’s Phasmid Phriday.

This week’s cold, windy weather (hello, False Spring) has given me the driest eyes known to mankind, so please forgive me if this entry turns out shorter than normal. Don’t make your job “reading on a screen” if you have a hard time retaining moisture. 

Anyway, longtime fans will already know that I love a good stick insect, so it was with great joy that I read in my colleague Fran Hoepfner’s Fran Magazine earlier this month a request to feature a frankly stunning bug currently on display at the NYC Natural History Museum. It’s the golden-eyed stick insect, also known as the black beauty stick insect, and both of those names are flattering and accurate. 

The golden-eyed stick insect, Peruphasma schultei, is a native of Peru and feeds on pepper trees in the forests and grasslands of the Cordillera del Condor, a mountain range in the eastern Andes that sits on the border between Peru and Ecuador. It’s one of the most ecologically significant locations on the planet, home to a large concentration of plant species unknown to science that have drawn biologists and botanists for decades, and parts of it are protected areas closed (on paper) to human agricultural or mining activity. 

It’s also a very small area in a very threatened environment, and as such the golden-eyed-stick insect is listed as critically endangered by the IUCN. Fortunately for the insects, they thrive in captivity, and since their discovery in 2004 (and official species listing in 2005 by Rainer Schulte, the biologist who gave it its Latin name) they have become one of the most popular stick insect species in the pet trade. 

It’s not hard to see why: they’re eye-catching even for a large bug. As adults, their bodies are long (females can grow longer than 5 centimeters) and hefty, and their back ends curl upwards like crooked fingers. They have large, bright yellow eyes and two pairs of small vestigial wings, which flash red when they’re extended in a threat display. In captivity there is a second color morph of stick insects with pink wings, a genetic trait that breeders believe is recessive and therefore hard to find in the wild.

They aren’t necessarily social animals but because they have such a specific food source they tend to live in groups and seem chill with other members of their species. They don’t fight each other, but they do have a special defense mechanism apart from the shocking red wings. When messed with, they will spray a corrosive, stinky fluid from glands on the back of their head that irritates the skin and eyes of anything standing too close. Since they’re such a relatively new species and since their native habitat is so difficult to get to, we don’t know all that much more about the behavior and preferences of golden-eyed stick insects—other than, like some other stick insect species, females can reproduce sexually and asexually, cloning themselves. 

The newness and popularity of golden-eyed-stick insects also indicates to us the wealth of ecological diversity still unknown to us within hard-to-access regions of the world that, like the Cordillera del Condor, can house a broad diversity of species in a small area. Places like these, hidden away from the avaricious industry of the global north, are worth leaving undisturbed as long as possible. 

IN BUG NEWS:

If you don’t already subscribe to the Criterion Channel I can’t recommend it highly enough, especially since they’ve just announced a critter series starting on April 1, which I WILL be covering extensively.