Before anything happens, I challenge you to see where the stick insect is, or are. You can tell me the answer either in the comment box or in my facebook at liantammy@hotmail.com
This picture was taken in the aquarium where I was volunteering my time at, I wasn't so sure what I was looking at, at first, and it took me a full minute to realize that I was staring face to face with the Stick Insects! Imagine if it took me so long to really see those creatures in a gallery, how hard is it going to be for predators to see them in the wild?!
Ok, ok, enough of the amazement shock that I was having; it's time for the real introduction for these amazing insects:
For all of us who have read the books or seen the movies of Harry Potter, we all know how sometimes we would love to disappear under the invisibility cloak, right? And you know that there are creatures who are actually quite skilled on blending into their environment so well to the extant that if not looking carefully, they are quite invisible to everyone! And one of those disguise masters is the Stick Insect.
Like the name, Stick Insect, those bugs are so stick like that they actually act like twigs too! They sway with the twigs with the wind by rocking back and forth as they move and they also even wear lichen-like markings to make their disguise more authentic. (Lichen is a kind of plant that, I'm not so sure, looks like moss.) They're typically brown, black, or green so it helps them to blend in with branches and twigs.
But once in a while that they do get attacked by predators (Like all other preys.) such as birds, although they don't bite back but don't think that they just stand there being defenseless! They can produce disgusting body fluids that's so bad tasting and bad smelling that the ones who try to eat them just spit them straight out! But other times, they just lose a leg to the predator and grow that leg back sometime later in the future. Wouldn't it be nice if we could do that, too?
When it's time to reproduce, the Stick Insect don't insist one needing a male to fertilize the eggs. This behavior is called the
"parthenogenesis", stick insects are a nation of Amazons, able to reproduce almost entirely without males. Unmated females produce eggs that become more females. When a male does manage to mate with a female, there's a 50/50 chance their offspring will be male. A captive female stick insect can produce hundreds of all-female offspring without ever mating. There are species of stick insects for which scientists have never found any males.
When the female lays her eggs, she doesn't lay them in one place like a crocodile or a chicken, she actually puts her eggs all over the forest floor and let whatever fate that comes to her eggs, but don't be so quick to judge all the mama Stick Insects! Some of them tend to do a better job by putting her eggs in the soil, or in the tree barks or even under some leaves!
And when those baby stick insects, called
"Nymphs", hatch, they eat their own molted skin.... Well, it's still nutrient, right? And also free food for those nymphs... besides, those molted skins are a dead giveaway for predators to catch the real insect, so I guess it's the best idea to ingest (eat) everything away before anything happens.
