"No, this isn't a make-believe place. It's real.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, writing for Discover Magazine:
"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 told the Australian Broadcasting Company,
"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.
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 — an unusual insect behavior
— 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.
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."
Please see the original article at: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/02/24/147367644/six-legged-giant-finds-secret-hideaway-hides-for-80-years
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