Meeting Phasmids at Zoo yesterday

I picked up 10 tic-tac sized eggs from the Melbourne Zoo yesterday. They will hatch in 3 weeks at the beginning of Term 2, all being well. The temperature and humidity regime in their lovely new Perspex enclosure needs to be just right! The mini Lord Howe Island ecosystem is checked twice daily, data being recorded by a dedicated team of students and staff. Communication and observation will be the key to the success of this project. I have never been involved this closely with such an important project. 25 schools out of 150 applicants to the Melbourne Zoo are embarking on this extension of the ark, for LHISI population research. Only a couple of dozen insects are known to exist in the wild, not even on their original island, but 23km off shore on Balls Pyramid, a rugged shard of rock protruding from the Tasman Sea.

The transformer-like stick insect was thought to be extinct for 80 years, until a rock climber found a handful of live specimens in 2003. “Adam and Eve” were brought to the Melbourne Zoo and there they started a captive colony. Around 9000 eggs have hatched in the intervening 9 years. Each creature lives for about 18 months, reaching maturity after 6 months. A female can lay 200-300 eggs in her lifetime. The large, nocturnal, dark brown stick insects were wiped out in 1918 when a ship ran into Lord Howe Island, spilling rats onto the land. They ate the entire population. Amazingly, a few of these special stick insects somehow made their way to Balls Pyramid.

If you’d like to see the LHISI home page, go to … http://www.zoo.org.au/lord-howe-island-stick-insect

There, you can even see a nymph hatching on video.

For the next 18 months, as much as possible, students and staff in Bellarine Science classes will focus on the return of these fantastic Phasmids. There will be cross-age peer teaching opportunities between Year 8 Environmental Studies students and Year 1 and 2 classes, who are studying Minibeasts. Year 7 studies on Classification will come to life with real examples of this extremely rare invertebrate. And Year 9 students will be vying with each other to focus their Behavioural research project on the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect. Their observations will be submitted to the Melbourne Zoo as part of the growing database of information about these little known insects. There will also be opportunities for collaboration with students from other schools who are also caring for the insects.

We must wait with baited breath for the start of Term 2 to find out if we have viable eggs. And then we will try to help the juveniles through to adulthood. And hopefully get some successful mating and egg production after that. That’s a long way down the track though, and for now, we will be starting with one day at a time.