• Question: what is the rarest insect

    Asked by nami123 to Ajay, Kate, Kuntal, Pip, Reka on 10 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Reka Nagy

      Reka Nagy answered on 10 Nov 2016:

      Probably one we haven’t discovered yet! The rarer something is, the less likely it is that we will find it. There are, after all, 950,000 different species of insects that we have discovered so far.

      Out of the ones that we have discovered, the rarest is a stick insect known as the Lord Howe Island stick insect, and also called the tree lobster. For a while, we thought it was completely extinct, but live specimens were rediscovered in 2001.

      They are also pretty large, measuring around 15 centimeters, or about the distance from the tip of your thumb to the tip of your pinky when you open the palm of your hand. I would NOT want that crawling all over me.

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