Stick to the point

Stick insects often find themselves transported to new abodes thanks to their talent for camouflage, but they are most at home in the West Country, suggests Ian Morton

- Ian Morton

TOOTHPICK thin of body, legs like strands of hair, slow and ungainly and surely as fragile as the delicate twigs they emulate, they are among the more extraordinary insect forms designed to frustrate predators. Imported unintentionally more than a century ago as part of consignments of plants from New Zealand, three species of stick insect are now comfortably naturalised here, mainly in the South-West, with small colonies on the south coast and in southern Ireland. These spindly little herbivores have a particular taste for leaves of the Rosaceae family and their extraordinary appearance has made related species from more exotic climes popular as household pets, kept in glass tanks.

Stick insects are parthenogenic, meaning males are irrelevant and thus rare. Self-fertilised eggs are produced by the females, coated with calcium oxalate in order to survive in the digestive tracts of birds. In their native environment, these insects live in the canopy and it is thought that their falling eggs lodged in the rough bark of imported tree ferns.