A friend of mine posted an update on Facebook some while ago with a photo much like this one:
With a caption that went something like “stick insect mummy or daddy carrying baby away to safety from my vigorous pruning of this shrub”.
This person obviously has lots of other friends on Facebook, like a proper fully functioning human, and many had commented appreciatively. “That’s amazing!” “Isn’t nature wonderful?” “I’m going to show this photo to my students at school tomorrow!” But I wasn’t so sure. Having watched a lot of David Attenborough in my time, I felt that there was more than met the eye in this story. So I asked our resident entomology expert, and they confirmed what I had suspected: this was a mating couple. This was what we found with the help of google:
I messaged my friend with this gentle correction, and rechecked her post the following day, to find this:
Aaargh! I guess it’s hard to forget the lessons we learned with Goldilocks and the three bears – papa bear is of course always bigger than mama bear. And in the meantime, someone else had corrected *my* mistake, stating that it was in fact the male who was smaller.
Oh well. A slightly dented pride and mild irritation at “heteronormative bull”, as our son called it, but actually overall it was a positive experience. So much interest in our native bugs, and not one person saying “ooh yuck! That’s disgusting!” Or anything remotely similar. I do wonder how the class presentation went, though…