Word: insectes
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...course, every war and insect story has its heartwarming moments, when enemies fall in love or, as was the case with Washington's Rosemary Byrnes, bugs have been close to the heart. "Several years ago in Mexico," she says, "I used to wear a live bug about two inches long with rhinestones on its back and a gold chain attached to a pin. I delighted in watching the expressions on people's faces when the normally quiet bug began to move on my shirt...
Achieving effective, environmentally acceptable methods of insect 'control will be expensive. The cost of producing even a few ounces of a pheromone runs into thousands of dollars; the expenses involved in sterilizing insects, identifying and isolating their hormones or finding parasites or pathogens that will prey upon them are equally high. The USDA alone, for example, will spend $48 million on insect control research this year. It will be money well spent, essential for keeping the insects at bay. Even as manufacturers begin producing some of the new biological controls, there are ominous signs that the ever adaptable insect...
...battle between humans and bugs goes on, with some hope that man will continue to maintain an uneasy detente with the insect world for centuries to come. But for the long run, the odds are still heavily in favor of the insect. For, as W.J. Holland's The Moth Book poetically prophesies, it is likely that "when all cities shall have long been dead and crumbled into dust, and all life shall be on the very last verge of extinction on this globe; then, on a bit of lichen ... shall be seated a tiny insect, preening its antennae...
...struggle between man and insects began long before the dawn of civilization, has continued without cessation to the present time, and will continue, no doubt, as long as the human race endures. We commonly think of ourselves as the lords and conquerors of nature. But insects had thoroughly mastered the world and taken full possession of it before man began the attempt. They had, consequently, all the advantage of possession of the field when the contest began, and they have disputed every step of our invasion of their original domain so persistently and successfully that we can even yet scarcely...
Within those limitations, however, insects come in all shapes and a variety of sizes. Entomologists estimate that there may be as many as 5 million insect species, of which fewer than a million have been identified and named (there are, for example, more than 300,000 species of beetles alone). Insects range in size from those no larger than a dust particle, and a species of hairy winged beetle that can crawl through the eye of a needle, to the Atlas moth of India, which has a 12-in. wingspan, almost as large as an oriole's. Brian Hocking...