Читать книгу Extreme Insects - Richard Jones - Страница 9

NAME	Phobaeticus chani
LOCATION	Borneo
ATTRIBUTE	greatest length in body and legs of any insect

One of the best ways to avoid being eaten is to hide, and one of the best ways to hide is to blend in with the surroundings using camouflage. Stick insects (also called walking sticks) have taken this to an extreme, and their pencil-thin bodies and pin-thin legs perfectly resemble the twigs through which they climb. So good at hiding have they become that some stick insects have acquired a trait that is a common evolutionary result of having no (or virtually no) predators – they have become very large.

For nearly 100 years, the record for the longest insect in the world was held by a specimen of a giant stick insect from Borneo, Phobaeticus (formerly Pharnacia) kirbyi. Its body was 328 mm (12.9 in) long, and from the tip of the outstretched front leg to the end of the back leg it measured 499 mm (19.6 in). This specimen had long been misidentified as the closely related P. serratipes, and it was only shortly after its true identity was established in 1995 that another huge stick insect was discovered. Ironically, this time it was a specimen of the true P. serratipes, found in Malaysia. It had a total length of 555 mm (21.9 in), although its body alone was slightly shorter than the famous P. kirbyi specimen.

Measuring lanky insects is fraught with difficulties, and this could have been the point at which some controversy arose. Most size measurements for insects deliberately ignore legs, antennae, tails and snouts because they vary tremendously within a population, especially between male and female of the same species. It has long been known that the leg lengths of stick insects vary, even when measured on different sides of the same specimen. However, the matter was settled in October 2008, with the description of a new species of stick insect from the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo. Phobaeticus chani was named after the entomologist Datuk Chan Chew Lun, who donated the largest of three specimens, found by a local collector, to the Natural History Museum in London. With a body length of 357 mm (14 in) and a total length of 566 mm (22.3 in), it takes the record no matter which way it is measured.