No sex please, we're British (stick insects)

Phasmids hailing from New Zealand become asexual after arriving in the UK

Eleanor Ainge Roy

@EleanorAingeRoy

Mon 19 Aug 2019 06.52 BST Last modified on Mon 19 Aug 2019 20.50 BST

A New Zealand stick insect that migrated to the UK more than seven decades ago has given up having sex and become asexual, prompting biologists to wonder about the use of sex at all – especially in Britain.

The Clitarchus hookeri is native to New Zealand but migrated to the UK some time between 1910 and 1935, catching a ride on shiploads of New Zealand plants that were transported to the subtropical Tresco Abbey Garden on the Scilly Isles islands off the coast of Cornwall.

Biologists from Massey University in New Zealand’s North Island have discovered that some time in the last 100 years the Scilly isles population of Clitarchus hookeri gave up having sex and start to reproduce asexually. The local population of Scilly Isles stick insects is now entirely female.

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Stick insect's propulsion joint discovered

February 16, 2016

The stick insect is a popular model organism in biological research for gaining a better understanding of insect walking movements. The advantage of the stick insect is that the structure of its body parts and nervous system are comparatively simple. For decades, textbooks have claimed that the force for maintaining body posture and driving movement was controlled independently by different joints. Now, as biologist Chris Dallmann reports, "this is not correct." The doctoral researcher at the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) at Bielefeld University explains that "actually, one and the same joint is responsible for both functions, and we can show this with our new analyses." Dallmann presented these findings together with Professors Dr. Volker Dürr and Dr. Josef Schmitz in Proceedings of the Royal Society, a prestigious biological research journal.

"We wanted to find out how a stick insect moves, and which functions the individual parts of the leg play in its movement," explains Professor Dr. Josef Schmitz, who together with Professor Dr. Volker Dürr is supervising Chris Dallmann's doctoral dissertation. "Amazingly enough, the force for propulsion and maintaining body posture comes from the same joint. This joint serves as a power unit and generates the largest amount of force in the leg. The other leg joints serve, in a way, as steering units, which redirect the power such that the insect can both hold itself up above the ground and propel itself forward," says Dallmann. "A similar principle operates, for instance, in insect flight, where big power muscles provide the main force that is then redirected by smaller steering muscles for lift and drag. This principle of functional division apparently stood the test of evolution."

Read more at: 

A master of disguise: A new stick insect species from China

Many representatives of the fauna possess unique masking abilities but stick insects are among the masters of disguise within the animal world. During a field trip in Guangxi, China Mr. Ho Wai-chun George from the Hong Kong Entomological Society discovers a new species from this enigmatic insect group, which he describes in a recent research paper published in the open access journal Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift.

Like the name suggests the new stick insect Sinophasma damingshanensis is distinguished by peculiarly elongated body and green-brownish coloration, which bear an astonishing resemblance to a plant stem. This natural camouflage can make stick insects extremely difficult to spot, and to make it even harder for the observer many also show rocking behavior, where they move from side to side to resemble plant movements in the wind.

The new species was discovered hiding in the thick evergreen forests of Damingshan, located at the south-central Guangxi, China during a collecting trip. To make the work of scientists harder this insects had to be collected at night when it is active. Luckily with the help of a torch used to spot them on the leaves of plants a number of specimens were collected, which later turned out to belong to a new species.

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Fossils of earliest stick insect to mimic plants discovered: Ancient stick insect species mimicked plant leaves

Date:

March 19, 2014

Source:

PLOS

Summary:

An ancient stick insect species may have mimicked plant leaves for defense, according to a new article. Many insects have developed defense mechanisms, including the ability to mimic the surrounding environment. Stick and leaf insects mimic plants from their environment, but scientists know little about the original of this interaction due to little or no previous stick insect fossil records showing this adaptation. The scientists discovered three specimens, one female and two males, belonging to a new fossil stick insect referred to as Cretophasmomima melanogramma, in Inner Mongolia at the Jehol locality, a site from the Cretaceous period (approximately 126 million years ago).

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'Mystery' stick insect discovered

A mysterious new species of stick insect has been discovered living in the Philippines by scientists.

The stick insect is wingless, lives on the ground rather than in trees, and is spectacularly coloured, having a green-blue head and orange body.

The insect also vents a foul-smelling spray to deter predators.

The stick insect is so unique that scientists have given it its own genus and do not yet know its relationship to other stick and leaf insects.

"Recently a colleague, entomologist Oskar Conle, showed us some museum specimens of a strange-looking stick insect found several years ago on Mount Halcon, a remote locality in the Philippine island of Mindoro," explains Marco Gottardo, who is studying for a PhD at the University of Siena, Italy.

The insect was found on the third highest mountain in the archipelago, which is considered one of the richest areas of biodiversity in the world.

"We were baffled. It looked so different from any other known stick insect in the world that we immediately realised it was something very special."

Mr Gottardo and colleague Philipp Heller carefully examined the specimen.

Continued:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19399735

Giant, awesome ‘tree lobster’ survived 80 years in hiding

The Lord Howe Island stick insect, which you see hatching above, looking like an alien struggling out of a human torso, will grow to the size of your hand. It’s also called a “tree lobster” — that’s how big it is.

The most incredible thing about these insects, though, is not how big they are or how Geigeresque they look, but how close they came to not existing. In the early 20th century, a British trade ship crashed on the South Pacific island that these stick insects inhabited, and black rats from its hold took over the island and ate all the bugs. One very small population survived, hanging out around one tiny little bush on another island (really more of a bare outcropping of rock), until a couple of Australian scientists found them there.

I really recommend NPR’s Robert Krulwich’s telling of this story. Here’s a taste:

"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 …

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."

To sum up, a giant, awesome bug that looks like an alien almost didn’t survive because people are idiots (and rats are jerks). But it did, because sometimes people’s aren’t total idiots and are a little bit brave. And now you can watch how awesome this bug is on the internet.

Source :  http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/02/24/147367644/six-legged-giant-finds-secret-hideaway-hides-for-80-years?sc=fb&cc=fp

http://grist.org/list/giant-awesome-tree-lobster-survived-80-years-in-hiding/