You’ve got to hand it to leaf insects; their camouflage is so well-refined that studying them is difficult and collecting them is near-impossible. A sub-group of stick insects, members of the family Phylliidae have evolved to leaf like the best of them, even going so far as to uptake leaf pigments to match their colors. In order to study these creatures, Royce Cumming had to visit and take loans from collections all over the world, looking at historic specimens often found only because a passing storm had knocked them out of the canopy.
But Royce is not deterred. He and his coauthors are organizing and describing Phylliids in order to make studying them more approachable, and to help people better appreciate their uniqueness. Listen in as he describes identifying and reclassifying leaf insects, pulling us into their strange and beautiful world.
Royce Cumming’s paper “On seven undescribed leaf insect species revealed within the recent “Tree of Leaves” (Phasmatodea, Phylliidae)” is in issue 1173 of Zookeys.
It can be found here: https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1173.104413
New Species: Phyllium iyadaon, Phyllium samarense, Phyllium ortizi, Pulchriphyllium heracles, Pulchriphyllium delislei, Pulchriphyllium bhaskarai, Pulchriphyllium anangu
Episode image was taken by Ashwin Viswanathan via iNaturalist and is used with permission by Royce Cumming
Follow Royce on Instagram: @RoyceCumming
Or check out his ResearchGate profile, where all of his work is shared open access: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Royce-Cumming
Check out this video on the phytochemical camouflage Royce talks about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JygVv3coRaU&t=1s
A transcript of this episode can be found here: Royce Cumming - Transcript
Further coverage of Royce and this paper:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/leaf-stick-insects-phyllium-asekiense.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUymjLIPWUk
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