stick insect

American  

noun

1. walking stick.

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stick insect British  

noun

1. Also called (US and Canadian): walking stick.  any of various mostly tropical insects of the family Phasmidae that have an elongated cylindrical body and long legs and resemble twigs: order Phasmida See also leaf insect

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Etymology

Origin of stick insect

First recorded in 1850–55

Example Sentences

The team examined three decades of data on the frequency of cryptic color-pattern morphs in the stick insect species Timema cristinae in ten naturally replicate populations in California.

From Science Daily • May 24, 2024

He described Mrs Garfield's stick insect as "noteworthy".

From BBC • Feb. 16, 2022

He and his colleagues described the first male Acanthoxyla, a genus of stick insect from New Zealand that was thought to be exclusively female, from a specimen found on a car in Cornwall, England.

From New York Times • Dec. 1, 2020

In 1883, one of the latter’s early editors, the entomologist and palaeontologist Samuel Hubbard Scudder, published a description of a giant fossil stick insect discovered in coal deposits in France by another entomologist, Charles Brongniart.

From Nature • Nov. 4, 2019

She’d gotten the idea from the stick insect, but Roz quickly realized that camouflaging herself as a twig was out of the question.

From "The Wild Robot" by Peter Brown