How could an animal that has perfected evade our detection?

Truly the noodlest of noodle scratchers.

The answer is that we don't fund science at the rate that we should, especially not bug science. Want discoveries? Gotta pay someone to actually do the work.

He long

He not that thicc

And most importantly

He look like sticc

People put far too much faith the idea that we as a society know most, or even all there is to know. Humanity has advanced far and increasingly faster in recent years, but we still know basically nothing in terms of the grand scale of things to discover and know.

Even now, our methods of discovering things like new species are far less advanced than people like this probably imagine - it basically boils down to time, persistence, and luck.

Bug if true

how does something like this go undiscovered until now

I don't know the specifics of this particular insect's origin story, but for a surprising number of insects & arthropods, the answer can be summarized as "nobody bothered to look closely enough".

Sometimes that's a literal fact -- the critter is so well disguised, lives in a remote or hard to reach location, or is so uncommon that nobody's ever noticed it before. But with surprising frequency, it's a case where previously undiscovered species have been right under our noses (or feet or rocks in our suburban yards) this whole time and we simply did not realize it. It's not that we don't notice them, just that nobody's ever taken the time to really study them enough to spot the differences from one closely related species to the next so we simply assumed they're all the same.

For example, there are species of beetles that about the only reliable way to tell them apart is to count the hairs on their butt when they are larvae. As adults, they are nearly indistinguishable. Now imagine that nobody ever took the time to study larval butt hair.I guess what I'm saying is, we need more funding for bug butt hair and general bug butt hair awareness, because it's a thing.

Last time this meme came up I had the perfectly worded Disco Elysium quote ready, but I've forgotten it. So just pretend I said it right now.

They live high up in the tree canopy. Not like people missed a monster bug walking down the trail.

That's no excuse, if we all grab a random stick to check if it's an undiscovered species of stick insects...

How's that concealment trick of yours working now Mr. Dickinsect? On the random luck scale we are equals!

Dude types like chatgpt

15 inches?! That's a BRANCH insect

We pay millions out to researchers just to look at sticks, leaves, and rocks to determine if they are bugs or not. Wait, that's wrong ...

I’d be terrible at discovering new species because I would assume anything I found was already discovered and exhaust myself looking for it in databases.

If that was found in Australia, it's

• Poisonous
• Venomous
• Chlamydic
• aggressive and bitey
• invasive

One or more of the above. No exceptions.

Is that... the Insulindian Phasmid?

The math checks out.

...listen...

Something Beautiful is Going To Happen

I miss that guy, must be on threads