Six-Legged Giant

First Name: Angela

Current Event Posting: 2

Topic: Science

Title of Article: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years

Author: Robert Krulwich                     Publication Name: NPR: National Public Radio

Date of Publication: February 29, 2012

Length of Article: 1,407 words, 3 pages

                The article starts off with a story about these large insects dating back to 1918. There used to be a stick insect that was famous for being large. This insect was the size of a human hand, and it was so long enough (12 cm) that the Europeans labeled it a “tree lobster”. Then one day, a supply ship, the S.S. Makambo from Britain landed at the Lord Howe Island and had to be evacuated. And here’s what happened: “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.” By 1960, it was presumed to be extinct.

                Then in 2001, Australian scientists David Priddel and Nicholas Carlile decided to scale up a 500 foot rock called the Ball’s Pyramid, to check out stories of climbers who had seen stick insect corpses lying on the rocks that looked “recently dead.” They found a single melaleuca bush, and in the soil below, they found a species of large shiny insects. There were only 24 of them on the entire island, and they were all under this bush.  The scientists decided to take a pair back to the Melboune Zoo, and named them “Adam” and “Eve”. Eve’s first batch of eggs had only 30 fertile ones, but they became the foundation of the zoo’s new population of walking sticks. 7 years later, the zoo had 11,376 rows of incubating eggs and 700 adults in the captive population.

                The only question now is when the right time will be for the scientists to release the population of Lowe Island Walking Sticks back onto the island. The descendants of the black rats still populate the island, so an option would be to mount an intensive rat annihilation program. However, the residents of the island would also not want their neighborhoods crawling with giant insects. In my opinion, I would launch the annihilation program because rats can be found anywhere in this world. These insects on the other hand are only found on this particular island for now, and I would much rather have to deal with harmless giant stick insects than rats.

Here is the link for anyone interested in pictures of the insects, Ball’s Pyramid, and a video of the insect hatching. (Unless you’re squeamish towards any sized insect, then I would definitely not recommend it as these guys are huge.) http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/02/24/147367644/six-legged-giant-finds-secret-hideaway-hides-for-80-years?sc=fb&cc=fp