Travels of a Fish Nut

I can’t remember the first time I heard about the Lord Howe Island stick insect, and I can’t say my interest has been much more than in passing. They would pique my interest when I saw them in the news, only to fade back into the vast and ever growing pile of ‘oh, interesting’. Then, at the beginning of November, I actually got to come face to face with one of these creatures and it was so incredible I decided to find out more. This is what I’ve learned… Lord Howe Island stick insects are - I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn - found on Lord Howe Island. This is a small crescent-shaped island in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. I didn’t realise until researching this piece that the island is actually inhabited. It has a population of 382 people according to the 2011 census . The Lord Howe Island stick insect ( Dryococelus australis ), or LHISI as it’s known to friends, was first described by Xavier Montrouzier in 1855 from specimens collected by the HMS Hera...

I’m sat in a oak-panelled room. The floor is wooden, the ceiling is decorated with plaster mouldings – ceiling roses, cornices and covings – that show that this is a room where the decoration is restrained not because of matters of cost but because of matters of taste. On the walls paintings of be-robed academics gaze down on the crowd as it filters in and slowly raises the volume from a quiet hush to a vibrant chatter.

I know that the revitalised blog has been heavy on the politics and light on the science and pretty pictures that characterised its previous incarnation. I'm still writing about science, it's just that it's being published on my department's blog, EcoEvo@TCD . It's one of the reasons this blog has lain dormant for so long as my desire to write had been largely satiated by posting there. I'll try and remember to link to my posts there when they come up, but in the meantime here's links to the posts from this year. I'll post older ones at a later date when I'm feeling self-indulgent. Hopefully one or two will be of interest. Killing in the Name of Science (Part 1): The Science of Scientific Whaling The one where I dissect (pardon the pun) a paper on scientific whaling and [spoiler alert] show it to have nothing of scientific merit. Killing in the Name of Science (Part 2): What About the Bunnies?  The one where I look at the legislation covering...