BY: TREVOR HEWITT

The SS Makambo was damaged when it ran aground at Lord Howe Island in 1918. While it was being repaired, some black rats on the ship escaped onto the island. This was devastating to the local food chain. By 1920, many animals and plants had become extinct.

The Lord Howe stick insect couldn’t handle the change.

Nicknamed the “Tree Lobster” due to their large size – up to 12 centimetres – and hard shell, they are the heaviest flightless stick insect in the world.

They became a main source of prey for the rats. The last sighting on Lord Howe Island was in 1920. By 1922, the rats were all over the island and the stick insects were nowhere to be seen, assumed to be extinct. More than 40 years passed without a single sighting.

But then there was a rumor.

Some climbers said they saw stick insect corpses while scaling Ball’s Pyramid, an ancient volcanic island some 20 kilometres southeast of Lord Howe Island. But the insect is nocturnal and no one wanted to risk scaling a cliff at night to go extreme bug hunting. Besides, Ball’s Pyramid was notoriously hard to explore.

The 550-metre volcanic cliff is jagged and has barely any flat land – hardly the ideal location for a critically endangered species to hole up. To make matters worse, in 1984, the Lord Howe Island Board made climbing the island illegal, except for scientific work.

And so another 40 years passed without any sightings.

Then, in 2001, after hearing the previous rumors, two Australian scientists decided to check out the cliff. David Priddel and Nicholas Carlile first checked out the island from the water. After seeing some plants that looked like they could support stick insects, they decided to take a closer look.

Climbing up the steep rock to around 150 metres, they found a few crickets, but no stick insects. Exhausted, they began their climb back down to the boat.

During their descent, however, they found a tiny patch of soil, most likely the only one on Ball’s Pyramid. Growing on it was a tiny Melaleuca howeana, a small dense bush native to Lord Howe Island.

But it wasn’t the bush that caught Carlile’s eye. Nestled in the patch of soil, like a gold nugget glimmering in a riverbed, were fresh insect droppings. They were large, Carlile thought. Too large to be cricket droppings.

The team decided they had to come back at night to try and catch the nocturnal insect in the act. So Carlile and a local ranger waited until nightfall and returned to the cliff. Flashlight in hand, they scaled the rock side until they reached the patch of soil. And then they saw it. Sprawled out across the bush were two shiny bodies, their shells glistening in the moonlight. In the dirt below were more, 24 in total, all surrounding the single bush. Carlile couldn’t believe his eyes, after over 80 years, the Lord Howe stick insect had been rediscovered.

“It felt like stepping back into the Jurassic age, when insects ruled the world.”

Later searches determined that the 24 individuals they found were the only ones on the island. The tiny patch of soil had been sustaining the last Lord Howe stick insects in the world for the better part of a century.

Carlile and Priddel weren’t quite sure how they got there. Maybe they flew in on birds. Perhaps they hid in the crevices of fishing boats. Either way, no one could figure out how they survived on a single patch of soil for so long. But that didn’t matter. What was important now was getting them into a breeding program.

This proved harder than expected. The Australian government didn’t want to move the animals from their natural habitat. It took over two years for officials to finally approve the team’s request. Even then, they only allowed four individuals to be removed – two males and two females.

When they returned in 2003, the team noticed there had been a rockslide on the mountain. Though initially worried that the stick insect population had been wiped out, they found them hanging around the same bush as always.

The plan was simple; the insects would be sent out and bred. One pair went to a private stick insect breeder in Sydney. He got them fine, but within two weeks they had died.

That left the other two. Nicknamed “Adam” and “Eve,” they went to Melbourne Zoo in Australia. Here, they were placed with Patrick Honan, one of the zoo’s specialists in invertebrate breeding. At first, everything was going well; Eve began laying eggs. Then she got sick.

It didn’t look good. After spending weeks trying to get her healthy, Honan said Eve was “as good as dead.” Then, as Jane Goodall explained to Discover Magazine, something amazing happened.

“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.”

Eve’s recovery was almost instant. Within hours, she went from being curled up on her back to walking around normally. Her eggs were harvested and became the base population for the breeding effort.

The program has become a huge success. By 2008, the zoo had a captive population of 11,000 eggs and 700 mature individuals. By April 2012, the zoo had bred more than 9,000 individuals. The Lord Howe stick insect seems to pair off with its mate, an unusual behaviour for insects. Honan showed Goodall photos of them sleeping at night, “in pairs, the male with three of his legs protectively over the female beside him.”

Now, with the conservation program a success, there is one more issue – reintroducing the insect to the wild.

On Lord Howe Island, the descendants of the rats aboard the SS Makambo are still running rampant and hungry as ever. This means that the first step to a reintroduction effort would be removing the rats from the island. Officials have suggested dropping 42 tonnes of poisoned cereal onto the island to kill off the rats, but its 360 residents are fiercely divided over this plan. In 2015, 48 per cent voted against it. Residents mostly fear the potential health impacts of the poison leeching into the island’s soil and water. “This stuff is going to rain down on the island. It’s going to come on to our rooftops. It’s going to be in the soils,” says Rob Rathgeber, a retired businessman living on the island.

Despite scientists’ claims that the plan is safe, Rathgeber says he isn’t convinced, especially since such a program has never been tried before. “We will be the first permanently populated island that will have this treatment … We’ll be the guinea pigs.”

Island authorities say these claims are wrong. Penny Holloway is the CEO on Lord Howe’s Island Board – the community’s equivalent of governing body. She says that concerns are misplaced and that the risks to humans are very small. Bait won’t be dropped near houses. Instead, it will be spread throughout the mostly uninhabited island.

Ian Hutton is a naturalist from Lord Howe Island. He says that though 42 tonnes sounds like a big figure, it means less poison in the long term. This is because the current control program is already using approximately two tonnes of poison annually.

Despite the program’s call for 42 tonnes of bait, there would only be 840g of active poison. This means that an adult would need to eat over 2.5 litres of the poisoned cereal to receive a lethal dose.

Holloway says that though successful eradication might worry people, it’s a permanent solution. “Once you’ve done that you don’t need to use baits any more.”

As of 2016, the Melbourne Zoo has hatched 13,000 eggs. They recently sent eggs to Bristol Zoo in Europe, the San Diego Zoo in the United States and the Toronto Zoo in Canada to create insurance populations.

From 24 individuals living on a century-old patch of dirt to a captive population of over 13,000, this hard-shelled insect gives a new meaning to the phrase “sticking it out.”