The Australian Naturalist, October 1, 1921, Vol. IV, Part 16, pp. 235-237.
Walter W. Froggatt, F.L.S.
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In the appendix to Captain Pilip P. King's “Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia” which was published in London in 1827, W. S. Macleay worked out the Zoological collections and described this insect under the name of Phasma tiaratum giving a life size drawing of the typical adult green female. I have found a specimen of a female labelled “New Holland” in the Macleay Museum Collection which is probably this type.
In 1833 George Robert Gray, the then Secretary of the Entomological Society of London, issued the first part of his “Entomology of Australia,” and in the introduction says that he intends to publish a similar monograph on various groups of Australian Insects, each complete in itself, with eight plates, at intervals of about six months. This, however, was the only number published. This first memoir was entitled “A monograph of the Genus Phasma,” with eight coloured plates each
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As the male is figured life size, the female is so much smaller in proportion, that it was evidently an immature specimen he had before him. The drawings and descriptions were taken from specimens in the famous “Hope Collection” made by the Rev. Fredrick Thomas Hope, containing many types of Australian insects, and now part of the Zoological Museum of the University of Oxford.
Gray says that Allen Cunningham collected and brought to England most of the Phasmids he figured, and informed him that they were found on sapling gum trees in the neighbourhood of Sydney.
This Phasma was figured and described in an article contributed to the Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales in 1905 “Stick and Leaf Insects,” and the drawings are reproduced in Australian Insects.
The spiny green Phasmids are not only variable in general colouration according to the tint of the foliage upon which they rest, ranging from dark green to deep yellow, but the body and legs are often curiously mottled with patches of creamy white, grey, and brown in imitation of the patches of moss and lichen upon the surrounding leaves and twigs, the arcuations and spines upon the body and legs, representing the thorns and serrations of the leaves of the shrubs of the coastal scrub.
Under ordinary conditions they rest among the foliage during the day, feeding at night, but when disturbed despite the swollen body and ungainly shape they can move about quickly, but when frightened have a quaint habit of resting upon the lower portion of the body and hind legs with the head, thorax and two front pairs of legs raised upward, the conical head pointed at the apex with beady eyes looking as if it was turned upside down. Remaining often for a long time without a movement she looks remarkably like some weird Chinese carving.
This Phasma has an extended range along the coast of New South Wales from near Sydney to the Tweed River, sheltering in the semi-tropical brushes, and most of the specimens obtained in the orchards where they are not in harmony with
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In the first three months of the year they drop their hard seed-shaped oval eggs which fall on time ground and evidently remain for some months before the young phasmid hatches out. The eggs, oval in shape, measure 5 mm in length and are brown with a curious stripe of creamy white down one side, the apex fitted with a saucer-like lid in the centre of which is a conical cork-like plug which the baby phasma pushes out on emerging. Each adult female is capable of laying about 300 of these eggs during the season.
The more slender bodied male is furnished with large well developed hind wings mottled with brownish bands, and can fly well, but can be easily identified by the typical conical pointed spiny head and modified spines and flanges on the legs and sides of the abdomnenal segments. The male probably lives in the tops of the trees and is a comparatively rare insect. I have never seen one alive, and the two specimens in the Departmental collections are thirty years old.
In response to my request for information as to the range of this insect
outside New South Wales, Mr. Kershaw, Curator of the National Museum,
Melbourne, in forms me that they have no record of it being found in
Victoria. The specimens in the National Museum come from the Clarence
River, N.S.W. Mr. Heber Longman, Curator of the Queensland Museum, gives
a list of localities from Brisbane, inland to Toowoomba and Killarney,
and northward to Cairns. In the Macleay Museum collections there is
one from New Guinea, five from Cairns, others from the Northern Rivers,
to Kiama, the most southern record.