Phasmatodea, Jacobson & Bianchi, 1902

Heleodoro, Raphael A. & Rafael, José Albertino, 2023, The taxonomic catalog of the Brazilian fauna: Dermaptera and Phasmatodea (Insecta), with commentaries on species list, types, authorship and distribution, Zoologia (e 22060) 40, pp. 1-17 : 2

Phasmatodea general information

The Phasmatodea are known as leaf or stick insects (in Brazil, they are popularly known as bicho-pau). They can be recognized by their leafy body or by the slender body in the case of those species that resemble sticks. However, there are several cases (e.g., Pseudophasmatidae ) that do not follow these two patterns. In these cases, phasmatodeans can be recognized by the prognathous mouth parts coupled with the elongated body, with or without tegmina and posterior wings, all leg pairs without adaptations, and cerci simple ( Zompro 2012). Phasmatodea are terrestrial and herbivorous, mostly active during night ( Zompro 2012). There are about 3,300 valid species worldwide, out of which over a thousand are recorded from the New World ( Brock et al. 2022). In the Americas, Agathemeridae , Diapheromeridae , Heteronemiidae , Phasmatidae , Prisopodidae , Pseudophasmatidae , and Timematidae are present ( Brock et al. 2022). Phylogenetically, Embioptera is the sister group of Phasmatodea ( Misof et al. 2014, Beutel et al. 2017). The most updated catalogue of the World Phasmatodea is the ongoing Phasmida Species File project ( Brock et al. 2022), an international collaboration among authors from all major regions of the globe. Special references should be made to Zompro and Domenico (2005), who published a catalogue of the type material of Phasmatodea deposited in Brazilian museums, and Araújo and Garraffoni (2012), who published a list of species originally described from Brazil.