Growing up, our house was full of animals. We seemed to collect them like Panini stickers or vinyl: welsh springer spaniels, rabbits, guinea pigs, too many cats to mention, terrapins, stick insects, giant African land snails and a siamese fighting fish.
Some of this menagerie were allowed to roam free around the house (including, perhaps inadvisably, the rabbits and guinea pigs – the furniture was covered in chew marks); others were housed in cages or tanks. But even the confined pets didn’t stay confined for long. The terrapins would frequently make a run for it, using the stone intended for them to bask on as a platform to freedom. We’d find them under the sofa or, in one notorious incident, at the bottom of the fridge, chomping lettuce (no, I have no idea how they got the door open). Still, for sheer Houdini-like escapology even the terrapins had nothing on the stick insects.
In the “boring pet” stakes there are few creatures more maligned than stick insects, and it’s not hard to see why. They could never be considered cute or funny or particularly characterful. For the most part they resemble, well, sticks. But stick insects are a lot more interesting than their reputation suggests. For a start, there are more than 3,000 species of them. Most people will conjure up the image of a skinny beige twig with tiny antennae, but they come in all shapes, sizes and textures: some are bright green and shrublike; some resemble dried leaves; some are dark and spiny like a bramble stem.
Our tank contained a host of stick insects: short ones, long ones, and flying stick insects with delicate pink wings. The big kahuna was a Macleay’s Spectre (more commonly known as a giant prickly stick insect), a thick-bodied creature, native to Australia, that looked like a particularly jagged autumn leaf. When threatened, the Macleay’s Spectre curls up its abdomen in a manner resembling a scorpion – though, with her chunky, rounded legs and golden colour, I always thought ours more resembled a tiny, spiny lion. There was definitely something regal about her, munching away on privet, secure in the knowledge that she was bigger and stronger than the scrawny twigs that skittered around her. Females can grow up to 20cm (8in) long.
To my memory, the Macleay’s Spectre rarely made a dash for freedom; she was likely too slow and cumbersome. That made her an outlier – the rest of the tank seemed to be constantly eyeing up an escape from their foot-tall, see-through Alcatraz. Their most famous jailbreak was during a car journey home from a trip to see our grandmother: the lid of their prison must have come loose, and they spread themselves across the car – cue my mum whizzing into a layby, and frantically attempting to corral them back into the tank as dusk fell. Then there was the morning we came down for breakfast to find that a clutch of tiny stick insects had hatched from their eggs and, being small enough to leave their lair, were perched on the kitchen window, practically covering the whole thing.
I can’t quite remember how my family’s stick insect era ended. I had been convinced that our dog knocked over the tank and butchered most of them, including the Macleay’s Spectre – but my family have no recollection of that incident (although Mum says the cats definitely saw off a few of the slower flying insects). More likely, the queen of the tank and her underlings just quietly died one day – most stick insects have a life expectancy of a year, and female Macleay’s Spectres live to about 18 months. But I can still picture her, scorpion tail primed, reigning over all.