Word: insectes
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...priest, fell back on what he called "the weapons of faith." He decreed a daily penitential procession in which townspeople shouldered a statue of St. Sebastian, the guardian against plague, and asked him to deliver them from crickets. After the initial procession of 500 hopeful believers, the insect horde slackened. After the third came a torrential rain that helpfully washed away countless cricket corpses and held down further attacks...
...long larva of the gypsy moth, a fuzzy brown caterpillar with blue and red spots that daily consumes one square foot of tree leaves (but not farm crops). Almost any kind of tree leaf from maple and pine to magnolia is meat for its mandibles. What makes the gluttonous insect so Jiard to control is that it has lacked natural enemies. It was imported from Europe to Massachusetts in 1869 by Leopold Trouvelot, a misguided naturalist who hoped to crossbreed the hardy moths with silkworms and start a new textile industry. Instead, when the bugs escaped their cage, he started...
...Just as expected, the gypsy moths (preceded in some places by equally ravenous spanworms) audibly began their leafy banquet on schedule this spring;-"It's awe-inspiring," said Charles S. Wood, chief of Massachusetts' bureau of insect control, when he heard millions of bugs chomping through the Cape Cod woods. "It sounds like a gentle rain in summer." Besides the chewing, naturalists say, the noise is partly the ceaseless drizzle of moth excrement and partly the rustle of falling, half-eaten leaves...
...essay on human fallibility and insect adaptability, The Hellstrom Chronicle seems just a little too facile. The pseudo-documentary framework of the film becomes rickety in places, as Hellstrom (Lawrence Pressman) intones a narration more inflated than informative ("The world was created not with the sweetness of love but the violence of rape"). It is rather as a visual experience that the film succeeds so supremely well...
...good portion of the photography as well, used microlenses and extreme slow motion to get awesome footage of mayflies living out their brief lives, of termites inside their intricate mound fashioned from mud and saliva, of a locust plague in Ethiopia, of a single drop of water killing an insect with its impact. Perhaps the most memorable sequence shows African driver ants. These sightless creatures instinctively use their bodies to form a carriage for their obese queen, and defend her by hurling themselves against attackers with suicidal ferocity. The viewer is brought so deeply into all this that after...