Story of the world's longest stick insect

The Insect Museum of West China (IMWC) in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, has successfully bred the longest insect in the world. According to the IMWC, the 64-cm-long artificially bred creature, called Phryganistria Chinensis, is now a specimen in the museum. [Photo: hsw.cn]

Compared with other insects, Phryganistria Chinensis (center) is long and thin, and it looks like a piece of bamboo. Its three pairs of legs are just like bamboo forks. Phryganistria Chinensis' mother, measured 62.4 cm, and was discovered in China. But how was the stick insect found? The story goes back to three years. [Photo: hsw.cn]

In August of 2014, insect museum curator, Zhao Li, found the 62.4-cm-long insect during a field trip in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. The previous record holder was a stick insect found in Malaysia in 2008. That measured 56.7 cm and is now at the Natural History Museum in London. [Photo: hsw.cn]

Zhao said he had been expecting to find the insect ever since a field inspection in Guangxi in 1998, when locals told him they'd seen a half-meter-long "huge insect" as thick as a man's index finger. [Photo: hsw.cn]

Zhao Li took this "huge insect" back to the IMWC. It then laid six eggs, one of which turned hatched into the current record holder. After hatching, Zhao found the smallest of the young insects' bodies measured around 26 cm, almost twice the size of those at the Natural History Museum. [Photo: hsw.cn]

Stick insects are good at disguising themselves as twigs or tree leaves, making them hard to notice. It's reported that there are over 3,000 kinds of stick insects worldwide. [Photo: hsw.cn]

The head of world's longest stick insect. A single Chinese female stick insect usually lays 300 to 400 eggs after mating. The eggs resemble seeds in shape and size, and have hard shells. They vary in the length of time before they hatch which can vary from 6 to 9 months. [Photo: hsw.cn]

At the end of July this year, the largest stick insect in the world (center) was successfully bred in China, with a total length of 64 cm including a 38.2-cm-long body. [Photo: hsw.cn]