Black leaf, our spiny leaf insect, lives a pretty quiet life – she nibbles gum leaves, hangs from the roof of her box, and enjoys showers of “Rain” sprayed by us often!

But today she did something really special!

Alissa was checking on her and we heard excited calls – “She’s had a baby, she’s had a baby!”

Now this was interesting because these insects don’t have babies, they lay eggs. So what was it?

We took the box outside to see it better.

And we discovered that what was little and pale and looked like a spiny leaf insect was in fact her old skin – she had grown out of it!

We thought she was probably hungry after all that hard work so we collected lots more leaves. She was also very wriggly and active – it must have been hard squeezed into that little skin when she was getting too big for it. Mrs Bell thought it might have felt a bit like a jumper that’s too small for us when we have grown out of it.