Word: insectes
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...insect family, says Dr. Hutchins, is the largest of the animal kingdom. It includes nearly a million species that range in habitat from Antarctic snows to petroleum pools, and vary in size from a fairy fly, which measures about one-hundredth of an inch, to an African goliath beetle, which weighs up to 3.4 oz. and walks around eating bananas, which it peels with its snout...
Ernst Mayr, who is in charge of plans for the research center and director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, said that besides aiding pure research, the wildlife center could help to solve the practical problems of conservation and insect control...
Searching for new angles, a few reporters concentrated on peripheral people. The Miami Herald's Gene Miller described prospective jurors, including an insect exterminator who was opposed to the death sentence for humans. Theo Wilson was impressed with a seeress named Jeannie, who turned up at the trial and claimed she had never made a wrong prediction. Her verdict on Candy: innocent...
...wooded South Carolina hillside, Payne set out the bodies of piglets that had been still-born or accidentally crushed by their mothers. One group of cadavers was carefully screened and the other protected against animal scavengers but fully exposed to insect invasion. Then the patient entomologist settled down for a decomposition watch. Within five minutes, the first flesh-eating flies arrived to begin feeding on the unscreened piglets. During the next few weeks, 522 species of tiny morticians -most of them insects-arrived to join the feast. Among them, Payne identified "3 phyla, 9 classes, 31 orders, 151 families...
Each successive stage of decomposition, Payne found, was characterized by the arrival and departure of particular groups of insects. With this information, he says, even if a body's decomposition were so advanced that a pathologist could not determine the time of death, the character of its insect population would be a dead giveaway to an experienced entomologist...