438 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, 1, 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. 
