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.iflscience.com/these-7-new-species-of-leaf-insect-are-masters-of-cryptic-camouflage-70459?fbclid=IwAR2J4dMO9DUPiwVfecoyR9jQS5MS0KpAz3oUzvBPPDS67tsaFR9CawaNrKA https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/31/new-walking-leaf-insect-species-discovered-genetic-analysis?fbclid=IwAR2eUc8vKouQz4oV7Cmkg_Boj9gihStzxE8r6n3TlzjYlmMCdIySvPIxYg4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUymjLIPWUk Be sure to follow New Species on Twitter (@PodcastSpecies) and Instagram (@NewSpeciesPodcast) and like the podcast page on Facebook (www.facebook.com/NewSpeciesPodcast) Music in this podcast is "No More (Instrumental)," by HaTom (https://fanlink.to/HaTom) If you have questions or feedback about this podcast, please e-mail us at [email protected] If you would like to support this podcast, please consider doing so at https://www.patreon.com/NewSpeciesPod