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National Geographic

This colossal stick bug is real. How many more monster insects are out there?

Sitckbugs are evolved to blend in with trees. This recently discovered one is the heaviest known insect in Australia. Photograph By Ross M. Coupland A thousand meters up in a humid, cloud-covered forest, amidst a slew of twigs and limbs, an onlooker spotted something different—this branch had legs. But even for a stick insect, a forest dweller evolved to look like a tree offshoot, this one was unusual. They quickly snapped a picture and posted it to social media. That's how scientists first saw the creature, which is now recognized as a newly discovered species and the heaviest known insect in Australia. 'We didn't expect to find anything this big,' says Angus Emmott, a researcher at James Cook University in Australia who helped identify the insect. 'It's about the length of your forearm.' The largest collected example of the species, now called Acrophylla alta, weighed in at 44 grams—about the weight of a golf ball. It's a third heavier than Australia's previous heavyweight champ, Emmott says, and is just a few inches smaller than the country's longest insect. 'This one definitely blends in better as a branch than a twig' says Nicole Gunter, the curator of entomology at Queensland Museum, home to two Acrophylla alta specimens. New insect species are frequently discovered, and while nearly two million have been identified, there may be as many as 30 million unidentified insect species left in the world. Gunter's own museum collection receives newly identified insects multiple times throughout the year, but it's still uncommon to find one this large.