land lobster

Image: Mikheyev et al, Curr Bio (2017) Once upon a time, on an island 400 miles from Australia, there once lived a giant stick bug.  What we mean by giant is, they were about 6 inches long and were actually called “land lobsters”.  But a hundred years ago, us humans moved onto the island with our black rats and pests.  Eventually, the black rats destroyed all of the stick bugs and they were then considered extinct.  However, back in 1960, some climbers on the island found a freshly dead stick bug in the waters, but there were a few differences between the new ones and the old ones.  Since then, scientists have gone back and forth about whether these were the same stick bugs that were considered extinct, but could have evolved to look like how they currently look.  Now that technology is able to do DNA tests, scientists were able to see that the newer stick bugs’ DNA were only off by 1 percent from the DNA of the older stick bugs.  This just showed the scientists that these weren’t actually new stick bugs, but that they were reintroducing the old stick bugs that were once considered to be extinct.  Weird, eh?