eTawau > Insects of Borneo > Stick insects > A spiny stick insect at Bukit Gemok

A stick insect with its tail in the air

A heavily spined stick insect on a broad leaf at Bukit Gemok, on a July morning in 2015

Corrected 29 September 2026. This record was first published as a night find on the night walk trail at Tawau Hills Park, at 9.59 pm. Both were wrong. The camera's clock had been set to pm instead of am, so every photograph taken with it that day carries a time twelve hours out. With the clock put right, the photograph was taken at 9.59 in the morning, and the photographer has confirmed the place as Bukit Gemok, where the same camera had photographed a stalk-eyed fly half an hour earlier. The black background is the flash, not the night. The earlier version of the photograph also carried a caption with the old place and time burned into it; that strip has been cropped off.

It stood quite still on the leaf while it was photographed, and it did not look much like a stick. Every part of it is armed with short, sharp, pale-tipped spines, and it holds the end of its body raised and curled forward over its back, like a scorpion's tail. It is a stick insect all the same — one of the thickset, thorny kind that live on the forest floor and in low shrubs rather than out among the twigs.

A robust brown stick insect standing on a broad green leaf, lit by flash against a black background. Its body, thorax and legs are covered in sharp pale-tipped spines, and it is mottled brown, cream and grey. The abdomen is held raised and curled forward over the back in a hooked arc. The antennae are long, slender and faintly banded. No wings are visible.
This is what you would see. Bukit Gemok, 13 July 2015, 9.59 in the morning. The flash has turned the shaded forest behind it black.

A stick insect, and how far the name goes

What the photograph shows:

How far the name goes. Stick insect, order Phasmatodea, is certain. The family is not: several groups of South-East Asian stick insects include heavily spined, wingless, thickset forms, and the characters that separate them — the exact arrangement of the spines on the head and thorax, and the end of the abdomen — are not visible in one photograph from the side. No family is proposed here.

Adult or young? Not known. Young stick insects are wingless whatever the adult becomes, and the spines can change a great deal from one moult to the next, so neither the missing wings nor the heavy armour says this one is grown up.

Why the tail is up

Many stick insects raise and curl the abdomen when they are disturbed, and it is usually taken to be a warning: it makes the insect look like a scorpion, and in some species it goes with a hiss, a kick of the spiny hind legs or a bad smell. Whether this one was warning the photographer or simply resting that way cannot be told from one photograph of an insect that never moved.

Two stick insects from one hill

This is the second stick insect record from Bukit Gemok on this site, and it could hardly be more different from the first. On 1 November 2009 a mating pair was photographed on the same hill: slender, smooth, green-legged and winged, with antennae longer than their bodies. This one is thickset, thorny, brown and wingless. The two show how wide the order is — and why "stick insect" on its own tells you so little about what you are looking at.

A stick insect of much the same build — robust, heavily spined, wingless and brown, about 100 mm long — was photographed at Tawau Hills Park in July 2017. The two may be the same species, or not; superficially similar stick insects are often unrelated, and that needs a specialist. Anyone identifying one of these two records should look at the other.

Photograph and leave. The spines are sharp enough to hurt, and a disturbed stick insect may kick. This one was photographed where it stood and was not handled.

The record

13 July 2015 · 9.59 am · on a broad leaf

Standing still, with the abdomen curled up over the back

Bukit Gemok Recreational Forest Park, Tawau, Sabah, 12 km from Tawau, measured from the 0 km Tawau landmark. One stick insect, about 75 mm (about 3 inches) in body length, resting on the upper side of a broad green leaf and completely still throughout. Heavily spined all over, mottled brown, cream and grey; antennae long and faintly banded; no wings visible. Phasmatodea — a stick insect. Family, genus and species not determined; adult or immature not known. One photograph, taken with a Panasonic DMC-LX5; the camera recorded 21:59, twelve hours out.
— iNaturalist observation 396620408

Words you may meet

Phasmatodea
The stick and leaf insects. Plant-eaters that hide by looking like twigs, bark or leaves.
Nymph
A young insect that grows by moulting and looks roughly like the adult. Stick insect nymphs never have wings.
Abdomen
The rear part of an insect's body, behind the legs.
Instar
The stage between two moults. A stick insect may pass through six or more.

Related pages

About the photograph. One frame by Wong Fook Yee with a Panasonic DMC-LX5, with flash, on 13 July 2015 at Bukit Gemok, Tawau, Sabah. The camera recorded the time as 21:59; its clock had been set to pm instead of am, and the true time was 9.59 am. The version on this page is the one published on this site before, cropped along the bottom edge to remove a caption that gave the wrong place and time; nothing else has been changed for this page. Size is the photographer's estimate in the field.

The account of stick insect defensive postures and of what can and cannot be told from one photograph is from the general entomological literature, including Bragg, P. E. (2001), Phasmids of Borneo, and the Phasmida Species File. The locality, date, size and behaviour are the photographer's own. Distances from Tawau on this site are measured from the 0 km Tawau landmark using Google Maps. Photograph © Wong Fook Yee. Page first written 2 September 2026; rewritten with the corrected place and time 29 September 2026.