Donnie Nichols
County Reporter
My neighbor, Flo Dwyer, called me one day last week. She told me she has been seeing a lot of walkingsticks and wondered if that was unusual. Walkingsticks (also called devil’s darning needles) are members of the order Phasmattodea of insects from the Latin plasma, meaning apparition. They are masters of disguise. Four species live in Missouri. The most common species is the northern walkingstick. Males are brown and females are greenish brown or green and grow up to 3 3/4 inches long and have long and slender antennae.
The second most common is the giant walkingstick and is the largest insect in North America with females up to seven inches long. The females middle and hind legs have spines; males have a single large spine on each leg.
They don’t bite or sting. Their main defense mechanism is their camouflage and body shape resembling a stick.
They spend most of their adult life in trees or shrubs feeding on leaves of deciduous oak, locusts, walnut, cherry or hazelnut trees resulting in what horticulturists call “pinching back” foliage which encourages new leaves and buds to sprout. They are mostly nocturnal, feeding at night and resting during the day.
We rarely notice walkingsticks until late summer or fall when they descend from the canopies and higher limbs to mate and lay eggs. We see them when they venture onto a building or sidewalk. Virtually all walkingsticks we see are females. It’s estimated that only one in 1000 are males. They are parthenogenetic, meaning they are capable of asexual reproduction. Female walkingsticks can reproduce even without a male partner although all their offspring will be female. If a male does fertilize the eggs, the resulting prodigy have a 50% chance of being male.
Depending on the species, eggs are either laid on the ground or a host plant where they overwinter. Adults die when it freezes. Eggs hatch in the spring and the young climb into trees. Like most other insect species, they molt though a number of immature stages before a final molt from which they emerge as sexually mature adults.
Some small mammals will feed on walkingsticks but their biggest predator are birds.
“Everything has it’s beauty but not everyone sees it.” -Confucius
