For some, the compulsion to find unknown species is overwhelming. The brass ring for these folks would be a giant primate found wandering the woods of the Pacific Northwest.
Despite the movie filmed in the Flathead a while back and television shows featuring credulous adventurers wandering the woods after dark with night vision goggles, the Sasquatch discovery ain’t happening.
I’m confident all the planet’s land-based megafauna have been discovered. There may yet be unknown, hulking sea creatures in the depths of the ocean. But on land our focus ought to be preventing the species list from getting any shorter, rather than adding myths.
There are varying definitions of what constitutes megafauna. I use the 100-pound standard. Anything that hits triple digits on the scale is megafauna in my book. And the way I see it, that’s just too large a critter to be hiding out on this planet, especially now that humans have pretty much overrun the joint.
Smaller critters are another matter. There are more than 1 million identified animal species on Earth, including more than 900,000 insects, the most plentiful class by far. An article on the Smithsonian’s website pegs the numbers of insects crawling around the globe at any one time as 10 quintillion. In case you’ve never bothered counting that high, 10 quintillion is a 1 followed by 19 zeros.
Scientists say we’ve only cataloged about 15 percent of the planet’s plants and animals. It’s safe to say that most of those undocumented critters are bugs. In some cases, big ones.
About 15 years ago a long-thought extinct giant turned up on Ball’s Pyramid, a remote spire of rock jutting 1,800 feet out of South Pacific near Australia. Ball’s Pyramid is a tiny island, almost all of which is nearly vertical. It’s a climber’s paradise, and the photos suggest the island lacks enough flat ground for even a small campsite.
Ball’s Pyramid is just 13 miles from Lord Howe Island, a bigger piece of rock where Lord Howe Island stick insects once flourished. These stick insects looked a bit like stonefly nymphs, only larger. Up to six inches long. The bugs were nicknamed tree lobsters by early settlers, and were a popular bait with anglers.
Unfortunately, the bugs succumbed to the fate that has befallen many isolated species when humans arrived: they disappeared. The cause in this case was stowaway black rats that escaped when a supply ship ran aground in 1918.
The invaders quickly wiped out the species, last seen in 1920. In 1960 we officially subtracted one from the estimated 8.7 million species on Earth as the bug was declared extinct.
Still, rumors persisted that the legendary bugs clung to existence on that rocky spire out on the horizon. Since Ball’s Pyramid can only be explored by rock climbers, expeditions were difficult. The presence of the bugs was finally confirmed in 2001, and a pair were eventually captured to launch a captive breeding program. There are now so many bugs some have even been returned to Lord Howe Island where they live in protected habitats. Releasing them back into the wild, however, will be futile as long as the rats persist.
It will be hard to rally support for wiping out all the rats just to repopulate the island with big, icky bugs. Charismatic megafauna these stick insects are not. Some of us are bug guys, however. It’s a symptom of being a fly fisher, a calling that forces you to overcome any trace of insectophobia as you spend your apprenticeship overturning river rocks to identify bugs trout like to eat.
As far as undiscovered megafauna goes, the Lord Howe Island stick insect is no jerky-endorsing primate. Still, it’s good to know mysteries remain out there on remote rocks in far off seas, even if the mega in this case is only an insect.