Provisional record. This page records an observation that has not yet been identified. It will be revised when a determination is available.
Order Phasmatodea. Family and genus not determined. Possibly an immature.
Photographed by Wong Fook Yee at 21:59 on 13 July 2015, on the night walk trail at the Tawau Hills Park Headquarters, Sabah.
The insect was about 3 inches — roughly 75 mm — in body length. It was resting on the upper surface of a broad green leaf and remained completely still throughout the photography. It is robust and heavily armed: the thorax, abdomen and all the legs carry rows of sharp, pale-tipped spines, and the body is mottled brown, cream and grey. The antennae are long, slender and faintly banded. No wings are visible.
The most striking feature of the posture is the abdomen, held raised and curled forward over the back in a hooked arc. Many stick insects adopt a posture of this kind, and it is often taken to be defensive; whether this animal was displaying, or simply resting that way, cannot be told from a single photograph of an insect that never moved.
What is established: the animal is a stick insect, order Phasmatodea.
What is not established: the family and everything below it. This animal is built quite differently from the Kinabalu Park records on this site — far more heavily spined and more thickset than the green individual from the Park Headquarters, and shorter and more robust than the pair from Sayap. Several groups of South-East Asian stick insects include heavily spined, wingless, thickset forms, and separating them requires characters this photograph does not show. No family is proposed here.
It resembles the 2017 record from the same trail. The spiny stick insect photographed on this same night walk trail in July 2017 shares this animal's general build — robust, heavily spined, wingless, brown — at roughly 100 mm against 75 mm here. The two may be the same species, or the same species at different stages, but that judgement needs a specialist and superficially similar phasmids are regularly unrelated. Anyone identifying one of these two observations should look at the other. The 2017 animal is iNaturalist observation 396772532.
The same caution as elsewhere on this site applies. The absence of wings cannot be used as a character until the animal is known to be adult, because immature stick insects are wingless whatever the adult condition turns out to be. Spination can also change considerably between instars in this order, so a heavily armed appearance does not by itself indicate an adult.
What would settle it: examination by a phasmid specialist. The most useful additional views would be the thorax and head from directly above, showing the arrangement of the spines, and the end of the abdomen.
The photograph has been posted to iNaturalist as observation 396620408, where it is open to examination by identifiers worldwide. As at the review date below, the record stands at order level only, and the question of adult or nymph remains open. Any determination reached there will be recorded here, together with its source.
Tawau Hills Park covers 27,972 hectares and rises from lowland forest to 1,312 m at Gunung Magdalena. It was gazetted to protect the water catchment serving Tawau town and the Semporna peninsula, and oil palm, rubber and cocoa now fringe its boundaries — which makes the forest inside it a genuine island. Its guided night walks are among the best-known ways to see the park's insect life.
The park continues to yield species new to science. In June 2026, researchers from Universiti Malaysia Sabah published Metarhizium tawauensis, a previously unknown insect-killing fungus collected in the park's Botanical Garden in January 2023. The team's remark on the find applies just as well to a photograph like this one: finding a new species here "tells us that much of Borneo's biological diversity is still waiting to be named".
This is the first stick insect recorded on this site from Tawau itself, rather than from Kinabalu Park.
Page reviewed: 2 September 2026.