Word: insectes
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Scientists have long admired the industrious ants that keep aphids as cows and milk them for their sweet "honeydew" secretion. Now a graduate student in entomology has added to the brief catalogue of insect husbandry Louisiana State University's Gary Ross has watched Mexican carpenter ants (Camponotus abominalis) protect caterpillars against their natural enemies and live on the juices that the caterpillars excrete. Though both parties benefit from the odd relationship, nature ensures that it is always brief: by the time they are 83 days old, the caterpillar cattle sprout orange-rimmed wings and fly away...
...lens to bear on all manner of African fauna, from elephants lumbering through the bush with ears spread like spinnakers to a striped chameleon inching its way into the center of a hibiscus flower. Animal Worlds, with photographs by Ylla, Fritz Goro, Eliot Porter and others, pursues fish, bird, insect and animal life from the tropics to the Arctic, with a text that makes their various worlds admirably clear...
...what will happen once the job is done? There is always some danger that an insect introduced to kill a pest may attack friendly insects or even humans. Berg does not believe that the marsh fly-either in its hungry larval stage or as a weak-winged grey or brown adult -poses any threat at all. Unlike the disease-spreading housefly, the sciomyzid avoids human company; its larva is hooked on snails to the exclusion of other food supplies. Says Berg: "Anything which is so highly specialized is not going to change its eating habits and start attacking babies...
...language guide, a vest-pocket bestiary, and perhaps a celestial-navigation chart. Already on the market are such prestigious monikers as Ford's Galaxie 500 XL (the XL means nothing at all), Chevrolet's Impala or Corvair Monza Spyder (apparently spelled with a y to avoid the insect image, despite Chevy disclaimers), Oldsmobile's F85 and Starfire (odes to the jet age). And there are more to come...
Bolivian doctors concluded that the disease was a form of hemorrhagic fever similar to those already known from Manchuria, Korea, India and Argentina. But was the responsible virus the same as any of those from other lands? And what animal or insect transmitted the virus to its human victims? Bolivia asked the internationally sponsored Middle America Research Unit, based in Balboa with Arizona-born Dr. Henry K. Beye as its head, to mobilize its forces for a jungle...