134 FAMILY IV. PHASMIDJE. THE WALKING-STICKS. 



scarcely be distinguished from a prolongation or branch of the 

 twig. Many people who see them thus for the first time and after- 

 wards watch them moving slowly away, can scarcely be persuaded 

 that they are not real twigs, gifted in some mysterious manner 

 with life and motion. On September 18, 1918, they were found in 

 numbers in a grove of the black locust in Putnam County, 40 or 

 more specimens being secured in a few minutes. They were usu- 

 ally found mating on the boles of the locust and when approached 

 and touched would drop to the ground and there remain mo- 

 tionless. 



D. feinorata is the most common and widely distributed Phas- 

 mid in the United States, ranging from Maine to the Rocky Moun- 

 tains, north to central Ontario and Selkirk, Manitoba, and south 

 and southwest at least to northern Florida, northern Texas and 

 the Organ Mountains, New Mexico. In Florida it has been re- 

 corded from Monticello by Davis (1.015) and several specimens 

 labelled "Gainesville, Aug. 15'' are in the collection of the Florida 

 Experiment Station. R. & H. (1016, 124) record it from Virginia, 

 North and South Carolina, and from numerous stations in Geor- 

 gia, and state that a male from Albany, Ga., is 84.5 mm. in length, 

 and that the material from the four states mentioned ''was all 

 taken in the undergrowth of pine and oak woods." A female at 

 hand from near Mobile, Ala., 101 mm. in length, has one of the 

 hind legs aborted, the length of the femur being but 10 and of the 

 tibia 11 mm. as against 24 and 27 mm. for the same segments of 

 the opposite leg. The basal joint of the tarsus is less than one- 

 third that of the corresponding normal one and only two addi- 

 tional joints are present. 



This is the only North American walking-stick abundant 

 enough to be of economic importance. In feeding they eat the 

 edges of a leaf, preferably those of an oak or wild cherry, usually 

 straddling it with, their legs, and in an hour will devour a piece 

 an inch long by a third of an inch wide. Riley (1870) records 

 that on occasions they are so numerous as to do much damage to 

 oak, hickory, locust and other trees. In Yates Co., New York, he 

 once found them very abundant in a woodland of 50 acres, which 

 they had attacked in numbers two and four years previously. He 

 states that: 



"By the middle of August the bulk of the pests were going through 

 their last moult, and by the end of autumn they had stripped most of the 

 trees, showing, however, a decided preference for the black, red and rock- 

 chestnut oaks, o\er the white oaks and hickories, which they affect but 



