Image of Lord Howe stick insects via Rod Morris. Ball’s Pyramid image via

The Lord Howe stick insect, Dryococelus australis, is a critically-endangered species of stick insect that was endemic to Lord Howe Island. The creature’s only-known home during the 20th century was Lord Howe Island. During the 1900s, the island suffered an invasion of black rats after a shipwreck. The rats feasted on the unique stick insects until there were no more to be found on Lord Howe Island. More via NPR:

[O]ne 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.

However, a tiny population of the stick insects was rediscovered on a nearby Jurassic-looking island called Ball’s Pyramid. Due to the topography of the island, it afforded only a diminutive space for the stick insects to cling on to.

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.

.       .       .

[T]wo 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. … 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.

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.

You can read more at NPR about the challenges that faced conservationists in removing a handful of stick insects for a captive breeding program, the difficulties in getting these remarkable creatures to thrive and breed in captivity, and the challenges associated with reintroducing them to Lord Howe Island.

Video: Lord Howe Island Stick Insect hatching

Video: ABC news story on Lord Howe Island Stick Insect