eTawau > Places of Interest > Bukit Gemok > Insects

Insects in Bukit Gemok Park

And the spiders, millipedes and lizards that share the trail with them

Bukit Gemok Park  ·  Canopy Walk  ·  Hiking Trail  ·  Flora  ·  Protected Forest  ·  Around Bukit Gemok

Bukit Gemok is a hill of about 428 metres standing 12 km from Tawau town, inside a forest reserve of about 445 hectares. A trail climbs through the forest to a canopy walk 231 metres long, the second longest in Sabah.

The thing to understand about the small animals here is that this forest is an island. The hill is cut off from the much larger forest of Tawau Hills Park by the plantations and settlements between them — which is why the Sabah Ficus Germplasm Centre at Tawau Hills was planted, as an attempt to grow a corridor of figs back towards it. Large animals have mostly gone from the hill. The small ones are still here, and they are what is worth walking slowly for.

Records with a date and a place

These have their own pages, with the date, the time, the exact spot and what the animal was doing.

29 July 2017 · 2.59 pm · beside the hiking trail

The dead leaf that was holding on

A reddish-brown caterpillar folded into the shape of a crumpled dead leaf at the tip of a shrub, with its front end raised and turned back
A caterpillar about 40 mm long, folded up at the tip of a shrub and disguised as a dying leaf — both ends lifted clear of the twig and only the middle holding on. A lobster moth, family Notodontidae. The page explains how to tell a caterpillar from a pupa in five seconds, and why the strange shape is a pose rather than a transformation.

13 July 2015 · 9.59 am · on a broad leaf

A stick insect with its tail in the air

A thickset brown stick insect covered in sharp spines, its abdomen curled up over its back, standing on a broad green leaf
A heavily spined, wingless stick insect about 75 mm long, holding its abdomen curled over its back like a scorpion's tail. The opposite of the slender winged pair of 2009.

13 July 2015 · 9.25 am · beside the George Mais Trail

A fly with its eyes on stalks

A small black fly with red eyes on long sideways stalks and dark-banded wings, standing on a dead brown leaf
A stalk-eyed fly, family Diopsidae: red eyes at the ends of long stalks, a spiny black thorax and banded wings. It stayed a few seconds and flew off. Photographed half an hour before the stick insect above.

1 November 2009 · 9.48 am · on a shrub leaf

Stick insects with wings

A mating pair of slender, winged stick insects with very long antennae and green legs, lying along a green leaf
A mating pair of stick insects, the smaller male on the larger female. Both are winged: the folded hind wings lie along the back as a long, finely lined strip that is easy to mistake for a stripe. The first winged stick insects recorded on this site.

1 November 2009 · 10.45 am · on a young tree

The Fish Hook Ant

Polyrhachis bihamata, carrying the pair of backward-curving hooks that give it its name — an ant that is genuinely difficult for a bird or a lizard to swallow. The Bukit Gemok record of 2009 is the earlier of the two on that page. It was photographed on the same walk as the stick insects above, an hour later.

Not insects, but from the same hill, and filed under Fauna rather than Insects: flat-backed millipedes mating on a rock (2008), and a house centipede beside its own shed skin (2009).

Older pictures from the trail, 2006

These were taken on the trail in 2006 and have never been identified. They are kept because they show what the hill actually holds, but none of them carries a name, and several of them are not insects at all — there are two lizards, three spiders and a millipede in among them. Click any picture for the full-size version.

The two lizards

A slender long-tailed lizard pressed flat along mottled grey tree bark, almost invisible against itThe same kind of lizard on bark, seen from above, its dark body and long tail matching the pattern of the trunk

Butterflies

An orange and brown butterfly with pale cream blotches on the forewing, wings open, perched on a twig above green leavesA large white butterfly heavily spotted and veined with black, resting with wings half open on green foliage

Spiders

Bukit Gemok spiders belong with the rest of the spiders of Borneo, which is the largest section of this site.

A dark spider with black and white banded legs sitting head-down in the centre of its orb web against pale green backgroundA jumping spider with banded legs and a patterned abdomen on a mossy lichen-covered surfaceClose view of the face of a hairy golden-brown jumping spider, showing the two very large forward-facing eyes

A millipede

A large black millipede with bright orange legs and orange bands along the body, curled over a dried leaf held in a hand

The insects

A metallic blue-green weevil with long pale-banded legs and elbowed antennae standing on a green leafA long narrow mottled brown and green insect lying lengthways along a tree trunk, shaped and coloured like a strip of dead barkA beetle larva on a green leaf, red at the front and black behind, its whole body covered in branched spinesA bright red and black true bug walking on brown leaf litter, with a large black spot on each forewingA stout brown insect with thickened clawed front legs standing on a dead leaf, apparently a cicada nymph

If you can name any of these, please write. They are good photographs of real animals on a real hill on a known date, and a name would turn each of them into a record instead of a picture. The address is at the foot of this page.

Visiting

The park closed in 2020 because of Covid-19 and stayed closed for two years. It has since reopened — see the main Bukit Gemok page for the current state of the place and its facilities, which still need work.

Tawau District Forestry Office
+60 89 761 833  ·  +60 89 761 835  ·  +60 89 761 863

Photograph them and leave them. Nothing on this site has been killed to make a picture. An isolated hill forest keeps only what it already has, so a photograph is worth more than a specimen here than almost anywhere.

Related pages

Photographs by Wong Fook Yee, Bukit Gemok Recreational Forest Park, Tawau, Sabah. The 2006 gallery is unidentified; the dated records above have their own pages and their own iNaturalist entries. The height of the hill, the size of the reserve and the length of the canopy walk are as given on this site's own canopy walk page. All photographs © Wong Fook Yee. Corrections and identifications to editor@etawau.com. Page rebuilt 16 September 2026; updated 25 September 2026.