The image of a tiny stick insect has been my background and logo on picmybug.com since day one, which is over 5 years ago.
I wasn’t able to identify it at all, that’s why I never wrote a story about it. My identifications from photos are never a 100% reliable, I keep repeating that. But with this little guy I have no idea what to do. Order Phasmatodea is all I have.
It happened on a guided walk in a forest area, something I don’t do often. And while I think about this insect, I find it more and more like a metaphor for me and my bug hunting experiences. Unconsciously this phasmid turned out to be picmybug in a nutshell.
Image the odds of finding an insect the size of half a toothpick. An animal that is designed to dissolve in the forest, literally imitating a twig. They even walk like a twig in the wind, rocking back and forth. The color matches exactly the vegetation. And to add on, I wasn’t prepared to see one. That’s usually the hardest part, to be not prepared mentally. The first animal of a kind is the hardest, the next one is easier to find because you know what to look for.
I took the photo with the Canon D60, which was a short term companion on my bug hunts. It’s also a miracle that the tiny animal is in focus using that setup. It is easily amongst my favourite photos.
When you look closely you can see the middle leg on the right side of the insect is missing. It’s a tiny animal quietly living it’s hard life, making no sound, leaving no traces, hoping to make it through the day. I’m always fascinated how such things can survive in a place with reptiles, birds and spiders everywhere. And this is my mascot. I never leave intentional traces, I don’t rip off bark, I don’t break branches, I don’t use any prey to get a photo.
There are 40 species of stick insects listed on iNaturalist for Singapore. Some are more brown, some are green, but since mine is so tiny, it is probably very young, it might even change color later in life. So I’m not even trying to identify it. The most common stick insects reported are Necroscia confusa, which is green, Lonchodes brevipes (brown), and Presbistus peleus, which seems to be brown usually, but has shorter legs than mine. So just by chances I would guess Lonchodes brevipes would be a starter for the ID. Funny enough, the name translates to short legged stick. No ID for my mascot, sorry!
In total more than 3500 species of stick insects are known. Some reach impressive sizes of more than half a meter. The well known walking leaves (family Phylliidae) are part of the order Phasmatodea. The huge Malayan jungle nymph Heteropteryx dilatata is another famous member of the phasmids. The order Phasmatodea was established in 1902 by two Russian naturalists, Georgiy Georgiyevich Jacobson, who was mainly into beetles, and Valentin Lvovich Bianchi, an ornithologist. I’m not sure how they got into stick insects, Bianchi was even on a polar expedition from 1900 to 1902. There is one species in Russia, Ramulus ussurianus, found near the Russian border to North Korea.
They are vegetarians, and mainly eat leaves of certain types, depending on the species.
Only in 2016 researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany found out how effective they digest leaves. One component, xyloglucan, wasn’t known to be digestable for larger animals. But these insects have the right enzyme, which was a sensation to be discovered.
And another German team of researchers worked on a different question. “The biomechanical dilemma of phasmid eggs – how do stick insects hatch?” was published in 2025. Seems phasmatodea eggs are hard nuts, and hatch after a long period of time, sometimes months. Females lay hundreds or even thousands of tiny eggs, that look often like seeds. There are photos of collections of eggs, that look a lot like pretty ceramic pots in various shapes. The question was what allows the nymphs to hatch eventually. The eggs have a lid, the operculum, and that is tightly closed, but later loosens up.
That’s twice stick insects in a nutshell. It’s a metaphor for picmybug, and literally the start of their life cycle in a hard shell.
And the nutshell has to do do with the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Pliny the Elder claimed in his Naturalis historia that Cicero told him Homer’s epic poem, the Iliad, was once written on a tiny piece of paper, so it could fit ‘in nuce’ – in a nut. His point was that humans can have amazing eye vision. It sounds like a myth, a good story to tell, and we all know how hearsay goes further and further.
That’s what the French Pierre Daniel Huet must have thought, and he went practical. He wrote a few lines in micro size, and calculated whether the Iliad could fit in a walnut shell. And he said it’s possible. Unfortunately there’s no rock solid information on this story, which happen pretty exactly 1600 years after Gaius Plinius Secundus’ work.
Pliny is definitely the first name I learned of the many thousands victims of the Vesuvius eruption of 79 AD. While he died during a self initiated rescue mission, his adopted son/ nephew Pliny the Younger survived and dated the eruption to possibly the 24th of August! That would mean three days ago from the post here was the 1947th anniversary. The date seems to be not so clear, and could also have been a few weeks later.
And believe it or not, the area of Campania, including Naples and Pompeii, is a major producer of walnuts and hazelnuts. That is picmybug.com in a nutshell. The man who started with the idiom died in a current production area of the very nuts.