In the classic 1951 UK sci-fi novel The Day of the Triffids, almost everyone on the planet gets blinded by a meteor. Triffids, carnivorous plants capable of limited locomotion, take advantage and start stalking people. I mention this, because “The Day of the Phasmids” may soon be upon us, and if I’m suddenly struck blind while visiting Australia’s Lord Howe Island, it’s conceivable that I’ll be gnawed to death by this mighty creature, the planet’s rarest insect. Thought extinct since  the 1920s but rediscovered in 2001, its survival is a tale fit for Hemingway. So here goes…

In June 1918, cargo ship Makambo ran aground at Ned’s Beach on Lord Howe Island, and it was nine days before she could be refloated. Stowaway black rats, buck-toothed and cunning, scampered ashore, where they were delighted to find the world’s largest insects. The rats licked their chops, and by the mid-1920s the endemic phasmid was extinct – or so the world thought. How could it be that a giant black stick insect, 15 centimetres long and as thick as your little finger, could have survived undetected in a wild colony for almost 80 years?

To find out, I met Dean Hiscox, Founder and Director of Lord Howe Environmental Tours. Dean was one of two climbers who rediscovered the phasmids in 2001: specifically, three specimens, on a lone Melaleuca bush on Ball’s Pyramid, a sheer 550-metre-high volcanic sea-stack 23 kilometres southeast of Lord Howe Island. “We’d set out to disprove the persistent theory that a tiny phasmid population had survived [there]. We landed ashore in daylight and did a few climbs, but guessing that the insect was nocturnal, decided to do one last scramble, after dark, up to this ledge less than 100 metres above sea level, and put paid to the story once and for all. That’s when we found them.” Not only was this a miraculous moment in the tale of our planet’s disappeared species, “these huge insects amazed us with how quick and agile they were,” Dean says.

The rats had indeed wiped out the last of the mainland phasmids, but they took to other species as well, sealing the extinction of endemic landbirds such as the Lord Howe Island gerygone, fantail, starling and thrush. By the early 20th century, the threat posed by the rats had become catastrophic, so Tasmanian masked owls were deployed between 1922 and 1930 to sort them out. Typical of misguided 20th century attempts to eliminate invasive predators, the owls showed little interest in the rats and instead took to preying on seabird chicks. Everything that could go wrong, had.