Animal · Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand
Stick insect
Phasmatodea — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
A stick insect is a living twig: so slim, so brown or green and so utterly still that a hungry bird flies straight past it. In many species there are hardly any males, and the females lay eggs all the same.
Picture credit: Vengolis (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the stick insect live?
Home: warm forests, bushes and hedges.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Brazil, India.
The short profile
Fully grown: 3–30 cm, record 64 cm. It weighs about 0 001 kilograms. On the menu: plants.
The story behind it
Stick insects spend the day hanging motionless among leaves and twigs. Some carry ridges like leaf veins or bumps like bark, and a few slowly change colour to match the branch they are sitting on. When a breeze moves the bush they sway along with it, which makes the trick even better. If a bird grabs one leg, the leg snaps off at a weak point and grows back at the next moult. In many species the females reproduce by parthenogenesis: they lay eggs without ever meeting a male, and every youngster hatches as a daughter. The eggs look like little seeds, and ants carry some of them home because they nibble only the fatty cap on the outside. More than 3 500 species are known, from a two-centimetre Timema to a giant longer than half a metre.
Find it on the globe
Stick insect is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How long can a stick insect get?
Most are 3 to 30 cm long. The record holder from China measures about 64 cm with its legs stretched out, which makes it the longest insect in the world.
Where do stick insects live?
In warm forests and scrub on every continent except Antarctica. Southeast Asia and South America have by far the most kinds, and the island of Borneo alone is home to over 300 species.
Can a female really have young without a male?
In many species, yes. It is called parthenogenesis, and every youngster is a copy of its mother, so always a daughter. Most of these species still mate normally when males happen to be around.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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