Supersized stick insect with wings the size of a BIRD has been found in Australia
The stick insect, which is around 40cm long, was discovered in high-altitude trees in the mountainous Wet Tropics region of North Queensland.
The female specimen weighed 44g, just less than a golf ball, but significantly heftier than Australia's heaviest insect, the giant wood moth, which gets up to 30g.
Footage shows the incredible wingspan of the stick insect, which is a similar length to a small bird.
The new species, named Acrophylla alta, is roughly the same size as a barn owl, a wood pigeon and a coot.
James Cook University's Angus Emmott, who helped identify the species, said the creature's large size could be an evolutionary response to its cool, wet habitat.
'Their body mass likely helps them survive the colder conditions, and that's why they've developed into this large insect over millions of years,' he said.
The remote habitat was probably also why it had remained undiscovered for so long, Professor Emmott added.
'They live high up in the rainforest canopy, and accessing that is almost impossible,' Professor Emmott said.
'You've got to wait until, for instance, a bird knocks one down or you get a big storm and they get knocked down. It's very, very hard to find them in situ.'
He added that while females have wings, they are 'not really great flyers' because of their 'heavy bodies'.
The next step in identifying and eventually naming the species is finding a male, which is proving difficult, and not just because they are as thin as a stick.
Male stick insects tend to be significantly smaller and so visually distinct from females that they have previously been regarded not only as a different species, but as a different genus altogether.
'You really need to find the male copulating with the female,' Professor Emmott said.
'You know what it is then, and you collect the eggs and you can actually ascertain that they're one of the same thing.'
The eggs of the newly-discovered stick insect were key to its identification, as no two species' eggs are the same.
'Every species of stick insect has their own distinct egg style,' Professor Emmott said.
'They've all got different surfaces and different textures and pitting, and they can be different shapes. Even the caps on them are all very unique.'
The stick insect specimen, along with another female, are now in Queensland Museum's collection.
Stick insects tend to be quite still in daylight hours to avoid predation by birds, so researchers traipse through the rainforest at night with head torches for the best chance of glimpsing them.
Likewise, their lifespan remains uncertain.
'We don't actually don't know that yet, but I imagine only a couple of years maximum,' he said.
'Because, yes, there's a lot of pressure on them with birds looking for them and eating them all the time, and I guess that's why they're so cryptic.'
The depth and density of life in Queensland's rainforests mean untold numbers of insect species remain undefined or undiscovered.
'Up here in the tropics, in northern Australia, we've got so many insects that are as yet undescribed,' Professor Emmott said.
'For instance, I've got an undescribed cicada in the garden here that a friend of mine is in the process of describing, and I've been working on the moths up here as quite a number of them are undescribed.'
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The Guardian
10 hours ago
- The Guardian
Deep impact: touring central Australia's cosmic craters
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In fact, these peaks were created in seconds when an object up to 1km wide hit the Earth at around 250,000km/h, 142m years ago, with an explosive force at least 20 times more powerful than all the world's nuclear weapons. No trace of that object has been found, so it was likely an icy comet that vaporised on impact. Erosion has since reduced the crater from its original 22km diameter. Satellite images uncannily resemble a staring eye under a sunburnt brow. Specimens in the Museum of Central Australia show that early Cretaceous central Australia was wetter and cooler than it is now, with abundant dinosaurs. Locally, they would have been vaporised, and anything living within 100km killed by the massive shock wave and extreme heat. The sound of the explosion likely travelled around the world. The Tnorala bolide event was a prelude to the big one, Chicxulub on Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, which wiped out the dinosaurs 77m years later. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion In their oral traditions, Western Arrernte people understand Tnorala as a cosmic impact site. A group of star woman were dancing in a corroboree in the Milky Way when one woman placed her baby in a turna (wooden cradle). The dancing shook the galaxy and the turna slipped, with the baby falling to Earth as a blazing star, striking the ground to create the crater's distinctive bowl shape. These days 'awesome' is a word debased by glib use. It's apt driving into the 5km-wide Tnorala crater, surrounded by cliffs 180 metres high, formed in a blink by a literally Earth-shattering event as our planet's crust rebounded to form the crater's inner ring. The rock strata in these peaks show that some were lifted from a depth of 4km by incredible explosive force, and are now inverted. It's not just awareness of this ancient violence that marks Tnorala as a sorry place. Local information boards describe it as a pre-colonial massacre site. So it's doubly proper that camping is forbidden. It's an unwelcoming place, where an object large enough to be classified as a city-killer fell from the sky. This kind of comet is now thankfully detectable by telescopes such as the new Vera C Rubin observatory in Chile, and also proven as feasible to steer off course. So forget Mars. Cancel that ticket. Instead visit awesome central Australia – where the mountains are upside down, the stars greet your fingertips and the dawns are so silent you can hear the sun sing. The Museum of Central Australia is hosting a Henbury Meteorite reserve discovery day on 10 August as part of National Science week. Henbury: Day trips to the Henbury Meteorites conservation reserve require a Northern Territory parks pass and the site can be reached by 2WD vehicles, however 4WDs are recommended. The reserve's basic facilities include picnic shelters and a drop toilet. Water and firewood are not available. Campsites must be booked online through Northern Territory Parks and fees apply. The nearest food and fuel supplies are available 85km south at the Erldunda Roadhouse on the Stuart Highway. Tnorala (Gosse Bluff): The Tnorala crater is accessible via a sandy track and offers picnic shelters and a drop toilet. Camping is not permitted in the reserve due to its status as a registered sacred site of the Western Arrernte people. Fuel and food is available at Hermannsburg, 62km east on the Namatjira Way. Travel beyond Tnorala is by 4WD only and requires a Mereenie Tour pass. Many of these roads may be impassable in wet weather. Associate Prof Duane Hamacher assisted with fact-checking for this story
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
‘Self-termination is most likely': the history and future of societal collapse
'We can't put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,' says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. 'I'm pessimistic about the future,' he says. 'But I'm optimistic about people.' Kemp's new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens. Today's global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are 'walking versions of the dark triad' – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots. The work is scholarly, but the straight-talking Australian can also be direct, such as when setting out how a global collapse could be avoided. 'Don't be a dick' is one of the solutions proposed, along with a move towards genuinely democratic societies and an end to inequality. His first step was to ditch the word civilisation, a term he argues is really propaganda by rulers. 'When you look at the near east, China, Mesoamerica or the Andes, where the first kingdoms and empires arose, you don't see civilised conduct, you see war, patriarchy and human sacrifice,' he says. This was a form of evolutionary backsliding from the egalitarian and mobile hunter-gatherer societies which shared tools and culture widely and survived for hundreds of thousands of years. 'Instead, we started to resemble the hierarchies of chimpanzees and the harems of gorillas.' Instead Kemp uses the term Goliaths to describe kingdoms and empires, meaning a society built on domination, such as the Roman empire: state over citizen, rich over poor, master over slave and men over women. He says that, like the biblical warrior slain by David's slingshot, Goliaths began in the bronze age, were steeped in violence and often surprisingly fragile. Goliath states do not simply emerge as dominant cliques that loot surplus food and resources, he argues, but need three specific types of 'Goliath fuel'. The first is a particular type of surplus food: grain. That can be 'seen, stolen and stored', Kemp says, unlike perishable foods. In Cahokia, for example, a society in North America that peaked around the 11th century, the advent of maize and bean farming led to a society dominated by an elite of priests and human sacrifice, he says. The second Goliath fuel is weaponry monopolised by one group. Bronze swords and axes were far superior to stone and wooden axes, and the first Goliaths in Mesopotamia followed their development, he says. Kemp calls the final Goliath fuel 'caged land', meaning places where oceans, rivers, deserts and mountains meant people could not simply migrate away from rising tyrants. Early Egyptians, trapped between the Red Sea and the Nile, fell prey to the pharaohs, for example. 'History is best told as a story of organised crime,' Kemp says. 'It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.' All Goliaths, however, contain the seeds of their own demise, he says: 'They are cursed and this is because of inequality.' Inequality does not arise because all people are greedy. They are not, he says. The Khoisan peoples in southern Africa, for example, shared and preserved common lands for thousands of years despite the temptation to grab more. Instead, it is the few people high in the dark triad who fall into races for resources, arms and status, he says. 'Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.' History shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, says Kemp, from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western Roman empire. 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Second, people in the past were not heavily reliant on empires or states for services and, unlike today, could easily go back to farming or hunting and gathering. 'Today, most of us are specialised, and we're dependent upon global infrastructure. If that falls away, we too will fall,' he says. 'Last but not least is that, unfortunately, all the threats we face today are far worse than in the past,' he says. Past climatic changes that precipitated collapses, for example, usually involved a temperature change of 1C at a regional level. Today, we face 3C globally. There are also about 10,000 nuclear weapons, technologies such as artificial intelligence and killer robots and engineered pandemics, all sources of catastrophic global risk. Kemp says his argument that Goliaths require rulers who are strong in the triad of dark traits is borne out today. 'The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.' 'Our corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of people,' he says. 'They're basically amplifying the worst of us.' Kemp points to these 'agents of doom' as the source of the current trajectory towards societal collapse. 'These are the large, psychopathic corporations and groups which produce global catastrophic risk,' he says. 'Nuclear weapons, climate change, AI, are only produced by a very small number of secretive, highly wealthy, powerful groups, like the military-industrial complex, big tech and the fossil fuel industry. 'The key thing is this is not about all of humanity creating these threats. It is not about human nature. It is about small groups who bring out the worst in us, competing for profit and power and covering all [the risks] up.' The global Goliath is the endgame for humanity, Kemp says, like the final moves in a chess match that determine the result. He sees two outcomes: self-destruction or a fundamental transformation of society. He believes the first outcome is the most likely, but says escaping global collapse could be achieved. 'First and foremost, you need to create genuine democratic societies to level all the forms of power that lead to Goliaths,' he says. That means running societies through citizen assemblies and juries, aided by digital technologies to enable direct democracy at large scales. History shows that more democratic societies tend to be more resilient, he says. 'If you'd had a citizens' jury sitting over the [fossil fuel companies] when they discovered how much damage and death their products would cause, do you think they would have said: 'Yes, go ahead, bury the information and run disinformation campaigns'? Of course not,' Kemp says. Escaping collapse also requires taxing wealth, he says, otherwise the rich find ways to rig the democratic system. 'I'd cap wealth at $10 million. That's far more than anyone needs. A famous oil tycoon once said money is just a way for the rich to keep score. Why should we allow these people to keep score at the risk of destroying the entire planet?' If citizens' juries and wealth caps seem wildly optimistic, Kemp says we have been long brainwashed by rulers justifying their dominance, from the self-declared god-pharaohs of Egypt and priests claiming to control the weather to autocrats claiming to defend people from foreign threats and tech titans selling us their techno-utopias. 'It's always been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Goliaths. That's because these are stories that have been hammered into us over the space of 5,000 years,' he says. 'Today, people find it easier to imagine that we can build intelligence on silicon than we can do democracy at scale, or that we can escape arms races. It's complete bullshit. Of course we can do democracy at scale. We're a naturally social, altruistic, democratic species and we all have an anti-dominance intuition. This is what we're built for.' Kemp rejects the suggestion that he is simply presenting a politically leftwing take on history. 'There is nothing inherently left wing about democracy,' he says. 'Nor does the left have a monopoly on fighting corruption, holding power accountable and making sure companies pay for the social and environmental damages they cause. That's just making our economy more honest.' He also has a message for individuals: 'Collapse isn't just caused by structures, but also people. If you want to save the world then the first step is to stop destroying it. In other words: don't be a dick. Don't work for big tech, arms manufacturers or the fossil fuel industry. Don't accept relationships based on domination and share power whenever you can.' Despite the possibility of avoiding collapse, Kemp remains pessimistic about our prospects. 'I think it's unlikely,' he says. 'We're dealing with a 5,000-year process that is going to be incredibly difficult to reverse, as we have increasing levels of inequality and of elite capture of our politics. 'But even if you don't have hope, it doesn't really matter. This is about defiance. It's about doing the right thing, fighting for democracy and for people to not be exploited. And even if we fail, at the very least, we didn't contribute to the problem.' Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp was published in the UK on 31 July by Viking Penguin
The Sun
a day ago
- The Sun
Prolonged hot weather may be fuelling rise in obesity rates, study suggests
BLAME your belly on the sunshine, say scientists - as hot weather makes us gain weight. A study in Australia estimated that someone's risk of being obese increases by 0.2 per cent for every day of the year that is warmer than 30C. Sweltering summer days might slow our metabolism by wrecking our sleep, put us off exercising, and have us reaching for fattening fizzy drinks to cool off. The UK has enjoyed an early start to summer this year, with eleven 30C days so far. The Met Office says 2025 is one of only three years on record to have had so many by July – with 2018 and 1976. Research led by the University of Adelaide compared rates of obesity and weather across eight Australian states between 2006 and 2022. It found citizens in the hottest areas were more likely to be obese and as an area's temperatures increased so did the number of fat people. Writing in the journal Economics & Human Biology, the study authors said: 'High temperatures can make outdoor activities and physical activities less appealing, leading to a sedentary lifestyle which has been shown to increase obesity. 'Further, extreme temperatures can cause heat-related sleep disturbances that influence metabolism. 'Temperature shocks can also affect the body's metabolism and appetite. 'High temperatures may suppress appetite in the short term, but can also lead to increased consumption of high-calorie, sugary beverages for cooling and hydration.' Two thirds of British adults are overweight and about 30 per cent are obese, raising their risk of cancer, dementia and heart diseases. I put my 11-year-old daughter on fat jabs after she got bullied for her weight - people judge me but I don't care The researchers suggested people in areas that are normally cold – such as the UK – might be more vulnerable. They added: 'We find that the effects of extreme temperature on obesity are more pronounced for people living in states with general cold climates and for older people compared to younger people.' 1
