101 YEARS OLD AND STILL NOT STICKY OR HEXAPODOUS...

THERE is clearly more to stick insects than meets the eye. The journal Proceedings Of The Royal Society B has just published a paper with the title, “Stick insect in Burmese amber reveals an early evolution of lateral lamellae in the Mesozoic,” which reports the discovery of a new species of stick insect in a 99 million year-old piece of amber. Other early stick insects, they tell us, only vaguely resembled sticks but this one has the slim body and plate-like lamellae that make the modern stick insect so good at looking like a stick.

This, they say, shows us that stick insects evolved the art of imitating vegetables much earlier than had been thought, a trick that may have helped them hide from predators. Naturally, I immediately sought out a stick insect to congratulate it and, after talking to a few sticks in error, I found one, even though it was pretending to be a stick.

“Well done!” I said. “I just discovered that you’ve been pretending to be a stick for 99 million years.”

“Are you being cynical?” it asked. “What were you doing 99 million years ago? The first primates were only just around and apes and monkeys still had another 35 million years or so to wait.”

“Exactly,” I said. “I’m really impressed. But I’m wondering why you think it’s important to look like a vegetable. The researchers say it may help you hide from predators, but what if those predators are vegetarians? Might not sticks be just the sort of things they’d devour?”

“Oh for evolution’s sake! You people are always so critical. Yeah, so a few of us got chomped on by vegetarians but we stayed safe from everything from the Tyrannosaurus to the Mastodon. And only veggies on real diets would bother with us anyway. We’re so slim, it’s hardly worth the trouble eating us. Anyway, that was the real idea: to stay slim. Even now, you think that slim is beautiful. We knew that slinky trick 99 million years ago.”

“But you’ve been the butt of many jokes since then. I distinctly remember Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder once saying that he and Baldrick were in the stickiest situation since Sticky the stick insect got stuck on a sticky bun”.

“Laugh if you like,” the stick insect said, “but we’ve been around far longer than sticky buns. Some say they were even named after us.”

“Then there’s the ‘What’s brown and sticky’ joke,” I said. “Answer: a stick.”

“We should get royalties for that one,” it said.

“Why?” I asked. “It’s a stick, not a stick insect.”

“The original version,” he said haughtily, “was ours: What’s hexapodous and sticky?” “Hexapodous?” I queried. “Having six legs,” he said. “Like an insect. So the answer is a stick insect.”

Sadly, at that very moment, an entomophage happened to walk past and took the words “like an insect” as an invitation. “Run!” I said to the insect. “Hide!” “Entomophage?” it asked, bemused, but its hesitation proved fatal.

“Insect-eater,” I said, and the entomophage proved my point. “Good diet food,” it said and went on its way.