Word: insectes
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...purposes, but Cott's concern is only with the relations of prey and predator. As a rule, if an animal advertises its presence, it is a good bet that a predator wouldn't want it anyway. Birds and fishes are likely to mistake inanimate objects for the insects on which they feed, so they can easily mistake an unpalatable insect for a tasty one-unless the former distinguishes himself by loud red, orange or yellow markings (although some other palatable animals adopt conspicuous markings in order to resemble unpalatable or poisonous varieties). Studies of 200 kinds of insects...
...Insect metabolism is on such a minute scale that it frustrated biochemists until radioactive tracers came along. But scientists are now discovering what goes on inside moths and flies, and Hamilton suggests that important new insecticides will soon be invented when insects' weakest spots are traced down...
...complex of environmental factors. In those days linesmen were stringing new telephone and power wires along U.S. streets, hacking mortal wounds in trees and often electrocuting them with leaky wires. New-laid gas pipes, too, were spreading out, poisoning roots along many a shady avenue. And several plagues of insect pests, chiefly in Massachusetts, quickened interest in guarding the health of trees...
...sponsored part of Miss Hawley's work to learn about past cycles of drought and deluge revealed in the old trees in order to learn about future problems in harnessing a great watershed. Federal entomologists were interested because weather cycles affect the number of insect pests which they may have to fight. Meteorologists welcome the tree-ring studies because weather forecasts derive in part from elaborate past data. And archeologists can read history in tree rings: Douglass, for example, showed that the dreadful drought which started the decline of the high culture of the Pueblo Indians began...
...first U.S. entomologists knew nothing about the insect. The beetle is not troublesome in Japan because 1) scarcely a rood of Japanese soil is left untilled for its grubs to flourish in, 2) natural enemies check its increase. So Japanese scientists were able to offer only one fact-that the beetles were attracted to light-and that proved unreliable...