26 THE FLORIDA ENTOMOLOGIST 
FOOD HABITS OF THE PECAN TWIG GIRDLER 
In the latter part of October Mr. Robert R. Thompson of the 
Palmer Corporation at Sarasota sent to the Experiment Station 
specimens of an insect that was severely pruning his roses. It 
was the hickory twig girdler, Oncideres cingulata. This is the 
first instance of its attacking roses in Florida that has come to 
our attention altho Felt, in “Insects Affecting Park and Wood- 
land Trees’, records it as an occasional pest of roses. In Flor- 
ida in addition to hickories, including the pecan, which are its 
normal hosts, it frequently attacks Japanese persimmons and 
Australian pines, Casuarina equsetifolia, and occasionally the 
water beech, Carpinus Carolinana, and citrus trees. In the 
northern states it commonly attacks elms. Felt also lists oaks, 
apple, plum, linden, pear, and peach. A peculiarity of their 
attacks upon Australian pines is that they seldom lay any eggs 
in the girdled twigs. Evidently the stimulus of the tree (which 
is not really a pine) excites, thru smell, sight, feel, or other 
sense, the girdling instinct but not the egg-laying instinct. 
“BRAZILIAN ANT EATERS” 
Py HeROLES 
Friends and Associates or the Florida Entomological Society: 
I send you words of greeting from the land of the lure, where 
the skies are higher, where the stars are more numerous in the 
sky, and where the Southern Cross shines every night to remind 
one of his duty to his fellow man. Brazil, the land where great 
rivers flow without having names, where mountain ranges occur 
that are not even indicated on the maps. This vast interior 
is really the Brazil. Rio de Janeiro, Sau Paulo, and the other 
large coastal cities are merely cosmopolitan conglomerations 
like New York, Chicago and New Orleans. One has to get away 
from these cities to really know and appreciate the Brazil for 
what she is. Three million people could live in this territory 
and find themselves less cramped than a hundred million in the 
United States. 
Well, what I started out to write you about was the ant 
eaters of Brazil. At first you will say that this is not an ento- 
mological problem. Maybe the eating of honey is not an ento- 
mological problem, but even entomologists condescend at times 
to satisfy their gastronomic longings for that delicacy. 
