Sticky
Director Jilli Rose
Countries Australia
Duration 19 min
Synopsis
Sticky is a short animated documentary telling the astonishing true story of the stick insects from Lord Howe island. Why these particular insects? Because their story is quite simply amazing. They evolved in the rainforests on Lord Howe, a tiny speck in the sea between Australia and New Zealand, and existed nowhere else. They were strikingly different to other stick insects - robust, fast, jet black and huge - islanders used to call them tree lobsters. In 1918 rats were accidentally introduced to the island and quickly munched their way through the entire stick insect population. Within a few years the insects were extinct. Or were they? There were some tantalising clues to suggest that they may, against all the odds, have colonised the most remote, inhospitable places you can imagine. . . Ball's Pyramid is the tallest sea stack in the world, as high as a skyscraper, as thin as a blade, rising almost vertically from the sea 25km off Lord Howe Island. It looks exactly like a super-villain's secret island. Seepage from rainwater supports just one patch of bushes on Ball's Pyramid, and here in 2001 a team of scientists found a tiny population of LHI stick insects, the last of their kind. Nobody knows how they got there. Sticky tells a wonderfully positive Australian conservation success story, celebrating the persistence of life, the adventure and passion embedded in science, and the little creatures underfoot.
Sticky is a short animated documentary telling the astonishing true story of the stick insects from Lord Howe island. Why these particular insects? Because their story is quite simply amazing. They evolved in the rainforests on Lord Howe, a tiny speck in the sea between Australia and New Zealand, and existed nowhere else. They were strikingly different to other stick insects - robust, fast, jet black and huge - islanders used to call them tree lobsters. In 1918 rats were accidentally introduced to the island and quickly munched their way through the entire stick insect population. Within a few years the insects were extinct. Or were they? There were some tantalising clues to suggest that they may, against all the odds, have colonised the most remote, inhospitable places you can imagine. . . Ball's Pyramid is the tallest sea stack in the world, as high as a skyscraper, as thin as a blade, rising almost vertically from the sea 25km off Lord Howe Island. It looks exactly like a super-villain's secret island. Seepage from rainwater supports just one patch of bushes on Ball's Pyramid, and here in 2001 a team of scientists found a tiny population of LHI stick insects, the last of their kind. Nobody knows how they got there. Sticky tells a wonderfully positive Australian conservation success story, celebrating the persistence of life, the adventure and passion embedded in science, and the little creatures underfoot.