Sticky (2014)

• 77%
• 2014
• Jilli Rose

'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 on Lord Howe Island, a tiny speck in the sea between Australia and New Zealand, and exist nowhere else. They're strikingly different to other stick insects - they are robust, fast, jet black and huge - islanders used to call them tree lobsters. In 1918 rats were accidentally introduced to Lord Howe 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 place 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.