Word: insectes
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...insect dips away...
...learned in wartime government service. From 1939 until 1943 Katz worked at Ohio's Wright Field, X-raying airplane parts in the hope of discovering any faults in the castings. Many years later, after moving to Kansas, he devised a way to use similar techniques for searching out insect larvae in wheat grains...
Naturalists have noticed for at least a century that insects have a way of mimicking each other. Butterflies of two species not closely related often show similar patterns of bright colors. Generations of entomologists have suspected that nature thus protects a butterfly that birds consider delicious by enabling it to resemble one that is distasteful to birds-but this theory has been widely debated and rarely tested experimentally. In Natural History, Biologists Lincoln P. and Jane Van Zandt Brower of Amherst College settle at least part of the argument about the survival value of nature's insect masquerade...
Forest fires destroy millions of dollars' worth of lumber each year. But in some areas fires run second to the boring, chomping insect hordes that eat their way through the forest, leaving wide patches in ruin. Last week a Russian scientist reported considerable success in a kind of bacteriological warfare against a pesky caterpillar that attacks Siberia's vast evergreen forests...
Stirred into water and sprayed on the advancing insect armies, the mix starts a deadly chain reaction, one caterpillar infecting another until they are wiped out. Better yet, some infected caterpillars live long enough to spin cocoons. For years the rain that trickles over the dead cocoons spreads virulent spores and protects the forest from a new invasion of caterpillars...