Word: ant
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...Summer Lightning (cloudbursts & all) aims soberly at the heart where most other cinemakers would aim at the funny bone. Whether the box offices will consider Producer Wanger as nifty a batter as Willie Keeler is another matter. Few Hollywood producers dare strike whimsical notes on the polymorphism of the ant, the physical advantage the paramecium holds over the amoeba. But in the capable hands of Henry Fonda & Joan Bennett, top Wanger stars, and an able cast, / Met My Love A gain's invertebrate allegories, its academic ups & downs, its ten changing years and its sopping-wet windup are invariably...
...Julian Sorell Huxley, well-known British biologist and popularizer, last week went to the ant. Considering the ways of this celebrated biological subject, of which more exist in the world than of any other kind of creature and which evolved a complicated social organization some 30,000,000 years ago. Dr. Huxley decided that the ant may be methodical, but it is stupid...
...thing, ants cannot tell the difference between ants and non-ants working in the ant hills. They make indiscriminate food deliveries all around. For another, they allow a species of butterfly to invade the nests and eat the grubs. The ants tolerate this because they like a sticky substance which the butterfly exudes. "It is," commented owl-eyed Biologist Huxley, "as if a nursemaid were to allow a wolf to carry off the baby from her pram in return...
...beasts: the aphid (plant louse), which reproduces by parthenogenesis (without mating), gives birth to males only in autumn, is so prolific that if all descendants of one aphid could possibly survive throughout a summer, their mass weight would be 822,000,000 tons. Most intelligent insect: the ant, though the wasp and bee run it a close second. Most surprising insect: the dragon fly, which is so fond of live meat it will even eat parts of itself, starting at the tail and eating toward its mouth...
...York's 2,500 animals have one man whose unique job it is to cook and prepare their food. Among the things the animals will eat during one year are: 1,600 frogs, 50 pounds of dried flies, 220 pounds of ant eggs, 1,300 chameleons, besides such usual food as carrots, beef, bananas, apples, grain. Daintiest feeder is the pigmy marmoset, which, for meat, eats only the smallest young lizards...