
Asteliaphasma is a genus of stick insects (order Phasmatodea) belonging to the family Phasmatidae. The genus is endemic to New Zealand and the species were first described by Salmon in 1991 and later moved to the genus Asteliaphasma. Members of this genus are found in the forests of the North Island, where they have been collected at elevations up to 900 meters above sea level. Asteliaphasma are nocturnal, apterous (wingless), arboreal stick insects that feeds on Astelia and rātā species.
GENUS
via GBIF · CC0
Asteliaphasma is a genus of stick insects (order Phasmatodea) belonging to the family Phasmatidae. The genus is endemic to New Zealand and the species were first described by Salmon in 1991 and later moved to the genus Asteliaphasma. Members of this genus are found in the forests of the North Island, where they have been collected at elevations up to 900 meters above sea level. Asteliaphasma are nocturnal, apterous (wingless), arboreal stick insects that feeds on Astelia and rātā species.
Species: Asteliaphasma jucundus Asteliaphasma naomi As of 2014, both species are considered not threatened by the New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC).
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).