The "rarest insect in the world" also happens to be freaking enormous [View all]

[n2doc]

In 1918, a battered British supply ship was forced to run aground off the coast of Lord Howe Island, a volcanic remnant located hundreds of miles off Australia's eastern seaboard. There, the ship's crew was received by the island's famous Dryococelus australis, a positively massive, hand-sized species of stick insect known to Europeans as "tree lobsters." But these impressive bugs were not long for this world.


In the nine days it took the ship's crew members to repair their damaged vessel, a pack of stowaway rats had managed to jump ship and invade the island. A scourge had been unleashed upon the D. australis population. By 1920, the island had been overrun by rats, and the insects had vanished. The tree lobsters of Lord Howe — long believed to be endemic to the island — were presumed extinct.

But in 2001, scientists made an incredible discovery.

About thirteen miles southeast of Lord Howe sits another island, named "Ball's Pyramid," that would look right at home on the cover of a Tintin comic. It was here, about halfway up the island's precipitous, 1800-foot-high slope, that researchers discovered what is believed to have been one of the last bastions of tree-lobsterdom in the entire world: a collection of two dozen of the enormous black insects, huddled beneath the shelter of a single bush.


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http://io9.com/5889341/the-rarest-insect-in-the-world-also-happens-to-be-freaking-enormous