Word: insectes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...been spared the hitherto unavoidable, tedious, 48-hour journey from Bagdad, Iraq to Teheran over Iraq's slow railroads and Iran's slower, often impassable dirt mountain roads. Better still, they had missed having to put up for a night in one of Iran's insect-ridden rest houses. What the plane's arrival meant to Middle Eastern diplomats, however, was that the German-controlled Lufthansa had just won a significant battle with British Imperial Airways over flying concessions...
...cosmopolitan creature is Cimex lectularius, an oval, flattened, mahogany-hued insect without wings and with mouth parts for piercing and sucking. Its principal food is human blood. Slum dwellers are acquainted with Cimex lectularius under a commoner name-bedbug...
...deer botfly (Cephenomyia pratti Hunter) is a small, blunt-headed insect which sprays its eggs into the nostrils and throats of deer, scattering them like tiny bombs while on the wing. In scientific journals as well as the lay press, the botfly has been widely publicized as the fastest thing on earth. It has been credited with speeds over 800 m.p.h.-faster than the fastest airplanes (over 400 m.p.h.), than the fastest birds (over 100 m.p.h.), than the fastest land animal, the cheetah (70 m.p.h.). Most of this publicity seems to have sprung from the reports of Dr. Charles Henry...
...probably enough to crush the fly." The power needed to maintain such a velocity would be 370 watts or about one-half horsepower -which is, as Dr. Langmuir exclaims, "a good deal for a fly!" Also, the fuel requirement would be so high that the insect would have to consume more than its own weight of food every second...
...Venus Flytrap and the Pitcher plant are the two insect eating varieties in the collection. The former closes its many jaws on juicy morsels of flies and slugs and it gradually absorbs them as its means of sustenance. The latter is more subtle and lazy--it makes no motions. Insects are lured into its pitcher-like growths and are so tangled and dazed by the intricacies within that they never return to daylight. Then there is the strange White Galla plant which spurts water from the tips of its leaves under a bright light...