90 THE FLORIDA BUGGIST 
partly true. He states that chickens will not eat the bugs. The 
writer saw chickens gorging themselves on the bugs, both 
nymphs and adults. The chickens had saved a portion of a cot- 
ton field nearest a house from destruction. It is easy to make a 
mistake like this in regard to the food of chickens. Fowls are 
often rank “standpatters’”, refusing absolutely to even taste a 
food to which they are unaccustomed. Probably it would fre- 
quently happen that a handful of cotton stainers thrown to 
fowls that had never eaten this species of bug would at first be 
refused. The writer has had a similar experience with pumpkin 
bugs which are usually eaten by hens. Indeed he once owned a 
flock of hens which persistently refused to touch perfectly good 
Kaffir corn. 
The cotton stainer is a southern species and usually does severe 
damage only in the southern part of the state. Indeed Barber, 
in his list of the ““Hemiptera of Florida”, does not record it from 
north of Lake City and St. Augustine. The absence of any 
reports from the northern counties, however, is probably due to 
the absence of entomologists rather than the absence of the 
bugs, as it is recorded as a pest of cotton in South Carolina, 
Georgia, and Alabama. It has been recorded from many places 
in Florida not in Barber’s list (see Sellards in Rep. of Fla. Ag. 
Exp. Station, 1905). Apparently in the compilation of this list, 
as in some others of the series of lists published by the American 
Museum of Natural History, the literature of economic ento- 
mology has been largely ignored. 
Two other species are listed by Barber as having been taken 
in the extreme southern part of the state. One of them, and 
at least two other species of the genus, are severe pests of cot- 
ton in the West Indies. One of these, D. delanneyi Seth., has 
“been rendered negligible” in St. Vincent by the destruction of 
its wild hosts, the silk cotton tree, the wild okra (Malachra 
capitata), and the John Bull tree. Perhaps the same happy result 
could be achieved in Florida by the destruction of the Spanish 
cockle-burr (Urena lobata) on which it largely breeds in the 
absence of cotton. 
The name “cotton stainer” is derived from the effect of these 
bugs on cotton lint. They feed.on the seed and collect on the 
bolls in the fields, staining the lint a pinkish or reddish color, 
greatly lowering its value. This staining is said (West Indian 
Bulletin XVI No. 3, p. 236) to be due not directly to the bugs but 
to fungi and bacteria which follow.—J. R. W. 
