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On Saturday 17th January the Phasmid Study Group had their winter meeting. Unfortunately I missed the AGM part but I managed to attend the two talks and got some new species to rear: Pseudophasma velutinum, P. rufipes ova and Meuseilochus sp. from Mount Apo. I will upload some photos of them soon.

The first talk was given by Mark Bushell and was a continuation of his Philippines phasmid hunting expedition. He’s a good story teller, so I enjoyed listening to his adventures and seeing the many photographs of foreign fauna. Whilst in the Philippines Mark discovered a new species of phasmid!

The second was given by David Robinson and gave a summary of the typical activities and the purpose of the International Congress of Entomology before covering some research on the phylogenetics of Dryococelus australis, the Lord Howe Island stick insect.

Dryococelus australis has quite an interesting story and I think it’s the only phasmid that has such an extensive breeding program. It used to be found on Lord Howe Island, an island east of mainland Australia. When black rats were introduced to the island, the stick insect was made locally extinct. As this was the only location that D. australis was know to occur, it was thought to be extinct. Sometime in 2001 a small colony was discovered on Ball’s Pyramid, a tiny outcrop of rock over 20km away from Lord Howe Island.

The phylogenetics paper has an example of convergent evolution and deserves its own post, so I’ll try and write a summary later this week.

There was a wonderful photograph of the castes of the ant Camponotus discolor on Myrmecos Blog.