File:Aphanarthrum Euphorbiae - John Obadiah Westwood - 515 1911.jpg

Thomas Vernon Wollaston published this drawing in his book ‘Insecta Maderensia’ in 1854. In the book he thanks Westwood for providing the illustrations, ‘Particularly, however, would I draw attention to the valuable help which I have received from J. O. Westwood, Esq., whose pencil has been so elaborately employed in the figures which I am thus enabled to attach, and by whom many of the minutest of the dissections were accomplished, — with a degree of delicacy, moreover, to which I did not myself at the commencement of this Work (though I have since succeeded in anatomizing the larger portion of them, likewise) lay claim.’ Wollaston wrote the following about this species:

‘An insect as truly indigenous as it is remarkable ; and one which might be easily overlooked, even by a careful observer, from its (apparently) exclusive attachment to the gigantic Tree Euphorbia (Euphorbia melifera, Linn. Phil.) of elevated, and more or less remote, inland spots. It was not indeed until my third sojourn in these islands that I succeeded in detecting it : but, whilst encamped in the lofty district of the Fanal during July of 1850, I was induced by the Rev. R. T. Lowe to visit a wood of these monstrous Euphorbias, immediately below the round crater-like basin of the Lagoa, on the descent of the mountain-road towards the Ribeiro da Janella and Porto Moniz, when, much to my delight, I found the entire substance of many of the older trees perforated by this elegant little Aphanarthrum.’