A very fast little stick

A while ago, I´ve written a blog about the Giant prickly stick insect eggs I´ve bought. What looked easy – you buy some eggs online, wait until they hatch and take pictures of the little animal – turned out to be a bigger challenge than I thought. First of all, you can’t take for granted that if you buy eggs they will actually hatch and if you finally have a baby stick insect to photograph, it turns out to be a lot less calm as its name suggests.

Nothing happened

At the end of May, I bought some eggs at a online store that specializes in insects and insect supplies. There were supposed to be eggs of different ages in the box, so it was guaranteed that the first eggs would hatch within two months. So I assumed I could start the Giant prickly stick insect series before the end of July. Exactly two months after I ordered the eggs, on the 23th of July, still nothing had happened yet. Hatching times aren’t exact science, but temperatures had been pretty high, which usually means that most animals will develop and hatch a little bit quicker than normal, so they were really late. A week later there were still no baby stick insects and  two weeks later the situation was still the same. I started to suspect that the two months guaranty was a false promise and it could take months for the eggs to hatch, if they would even hatch at all.

Baby stick insect

I started to ask myself if I was willing to wait such a long time and if I maybe could find a baby Giant prickly stick insect somewhere else. Two weeks ago, I found an advert on Marktplaats, the Dutch EBay, for Giant prickly stick insect eggs and nymphs. I sent the seller a message, asking if they knew when the eggs would hatch. They didn’t have that information, so I asked if they could help me with a newly hatched animal. That was not a problem and we agreed that they would sent me a message, as soon as one of the baby stick insects was born. That happened last Friday afternoon, so I raced to Utrecht to pick up the newly born Giant prickly stick insect.

Fast runner

Because it was already late and I didn’t want to cause the little stick insect too much stress, I decided to postpone the photo shoot to the next day. It was born late in the afternoon, so the next morning it would still be less than 24 hours old. I carefully put it on the white background using a leaf and found out very quickly that stick insect prefer running to walking. Fortunately, I could stop it before it would fall off the table and put it back in its spot again. After about five minutes, it was done running and it just stayed still so I could take the picture. I’m very curious to see how the next photo session will go, hopefully the surroundings are a bit more familiar and its running days are over.