Rats reached Lord Howe Island in 1918 from a wrecked supply ship. The stick insect, large, flightless and slow, disappeared within a couple of years and was formally regarded as extinct.
Ball's Pyramid, a bare volcanic stack about 20 kilometres away, carried almost no vegetation, but climbers had reported dead phasmid remains there. A survey in 2001 found live insects at night beneath a single Melaleuca howeana shrub growing on a ledge, the population numbering in the low tens. Two pairs were removed for captive breeding in 2003. One female, later known by the name Eve, founded most of the captive stock after intensive intervention when she fell ill.
Subsequent genetic work compared the Ball's Pyramid insects with museum specimens from Lord Howe Island and supported treating them as the same species despite morphological differences. Captive colonies now number in the thousands, but reintroduction depended on the island's rodent eradication programme, and long-term establishment in the wild is not yet assured.