It's commonly assumed that when insects are eaten by birds, they and their unborn young have no chance of survival. However, a team of Japanese researchers hypothesized that the eggs within insect ...

Known for exceptional mimicry, stick insects have evolved a range of egg-laying techniques to maximize egg survival while maintaining their disguise – including dropping eggs to the ground, skewering ...

Stick insects make a certain amount of sense, evolutionarily speaking. They look like sticks, or twigs, or leaves; thus camouflaged, they presumably have a better chance of avoiding predators, ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. The Lord Howe stick insect (Dryococelus australis) was ...

A colossal stick insect found living in the highland rainforest of northeastern Australia could be the chonkiest (read: heaviest) bug the continent has to offer. Acrophylla alta, as the species has ...

Stuck in the ground, plants have a challenge when it comes to spreading their seeds. But the greenery has developed some surprisingly sneaky ways to get around their immobility—prickly seeds that ...

For decades, researchers thought that wood-feeding insects relied entirely on their helpful microbes to break down the tough cell walls of plants. Recently, cellulase, an enzyme that digests the cell ...

Stick and leaf insects are a strikingly bizarre group of insects with a worldwide distribution. They are famous for their impressively large body size and their remarkable ability to camouflage ...