ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. [Nov. , '08 



covered with green thrifty grass, but now the whole hillside is bare 

 as a pavement." 



Other reports show that the insect is occurring in destructive num- 

 bers in several other counties throughout the interior valleys of the 

 State "where great tracts of pasture land have been rendered worth- 

 less, resembling land after a prairie fire has swept over it." 



The larvae sent to us seemed identical with the larvae of Tipula 

 simplex Doane, and adults issuing a few days since shows this identi- 

 fication to be correct. Mr. W. F. Derby, an assistant in the Ento- 

 mology laboratories here, very carefully worked out the life history 

 of this and other species here last year and has his results ready for 

 publication, and Prof. H. J. Quayle, of University of California, is 

 investigating the extent and seriousness of the outbreak, so I will not 

 dwell on these points. I only wish to call attention to the remark- 

 able fact that in this species which has so suddenly leaped into promi- 

 nence the female is practically wingless, the wings being reduced to 

 mere vestiges and serving in no way as organs of locomotion. In 

 Ento. News, Vol. 18, No. i, I described the female and gave some 

 notes on their abundance at Stanford. 



Although practically all the members of this genus have rather 

 large, well developed wings, none of them are strong flyers, many 

 of them indeed using their wings quite awkwardly and flying only 

 short distances. Nevertheless, these wings are much better than noth- 

 ing when it comes to the species distributing itself. The female of 

 T. simplex can only move about by crawling slowly and laboriously 

 over the grass. From observations made here they rarely travel more 

 than a few feet before they deposit their eggs in the ground, after 

 which they soon die. Occasionally some of the females or the larvae 

 or pupae are washed away in the little temporary streams that drain 

 these lands during or after a hard rain and this doubtless helps some 

 in distributing the species. 



However, this wingless condition may have come about, whether by 

 natural selection, heterogenesis or what not, the fact that this species is 

 so widely and abundantly distributed over the State when we would 

 naturally expect it to occur in limited numbers and restricted areas 

 shows that the adaptation is an extremely successful one. It is inter- 

 esting to note in this connection that in another species of this same 

 genus, Tipula vestigipennis Doane MS. both the male and female are 

 practically wingless, yet the species is very abundant in certain locali- 

 ties, but has only been reported from San Francisco and nearby 

 regions. 



I find records of two other outbreaks of Tipulid larvae in California, 

 but in neither instance was the species identified. R. W. DOANE, 

 Stanford University, Cal. 



