“Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye.
With a cheer, not a tear,make it gay.”
Really? Well, Gracie Fields and the Ovaltineys did it like that. Anyway our First consignment of excess stick insect eggs has gone off to South Wales. You’ll remember the Lord blessed Tinky the Stick Insect real good, and she produced seed as numerous as the sands of the sea. Faced with a plague of phasmids in a few weeks time, I panicked and various friends stepped in, including Richard Hall. Yesterday I loaded a couple of dozen little eggs, weighed and polished, into a tic-tac box for safety and packed it in bubblewrap. It’s over to the post office now. I hope they keep them warm at night. I’d like Richard to raise them as good Methodists, with a passion for social justice and appetite for committee work.
If you get stick insect eggs in the post, you put them in a dish within a tank or other contained space, out of direct sunlight. It’s important they don't dry out (watch that central heating) or go mouldy with damp. What seemed to trigger the hatching in ours was having fresh bramble leaves nearby, but that could be an old wives tale. These were laid between July and November 2007, and should hatch sometime between now and October.
What happens is the pot top pops out, followed by a coiled up nymph that looks a bit like a scorpion. The back unrolls, and they start exploring vigorously, usually with the little pot hanging off the back right leg. It will come off in due course, about an hour. Sometimes the leg comes with it (Isn’t nature marvellous?) but I'm assured legs can grow back. We have a pot of brambles with young shoots at the top nearby, sealed with kitchen roll at the bottom to prevent insects falling in and, er, that's it. Some websites report babies dying within a week or so through failure to latch onto feeding shoots or, more commonly pesticides on their brambles (Womble poison?) We’ve tried rose, eucalyptus, oak leaves and Raspberry cane, but Tinky was a Bramble girl for preference.
Finally, just to get the facts of life straight, these are female eggs produced asexually by females. The males have bigger wings and fly (ooh, scary). These have dinky little wing cases and chomp leaves all day. If you want males, you can mate these with petshop boys, but we don't allow that sort of thing round here. Play your cards right, and you could have, er, up to 3,600 females of your own around September 2009. A right old playboy mansion...
Last of this year's Stick Insects has now curled up its toes. MacLeay’s Wraiths weren’t discovered until 1828, but if they had been, they’d have been popular in the Middle Ages, as reminders of slow and constant mortality. They develop papery, blotchy skin, lose their grip, and finally start falling to pieces, when, in the course of nature, something would snaffle them up, no doubt.
Bits of Tinky Winky II started falling off a week or so ago, and she ended up doing a kind of Byronic deathbed scene on leaves at the bottom of the tank, because she couldn’t hang from brambles any more but was obviously still just alive. We hope she died happy.
We should have provided piped Mahler for a kind of Death in Venice effect. Try that next year. Woodland burial out the back was this morning. We have 600 eggs for next year, expected to start hatching this autumn. MacLeay’s Wraiths live just under a year, so anthropomorphically minded fans will be glad to know that each Stick Insect Year is about 4 days....
