Word: insects
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have been tramping their own woodlands. There in the rain forests of southern Chile were vast stands of beech, remarkably similar to the trees of their native land. The damp Chilean glades were greenly upholstered with ferns and mosses almost exactly like those that grow in Australasia. Even swarming insects looked the same as the insects of home. How did delicate plant and insect life ever make the difficult migration across great southern oceans or the hostile icecap of Antarctica...
Come early, and we'll treat you to four days and four nights of bivouac in a local state forest, where you will sleep under the stars, share your Army rations with our insect hosts, and observe our training day, which runs from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. But don't bring any party paraphernalia. A pup tent gets kind of crowded when a hi-fi set and a couple of deck chairs are installed...
...Tiago lives in a drafty, 200-year-old palace of masonry and wood with huge oak doors and walls four feet thick, "to keep out the Protestants." It boasts "a complete, live collection of every known tropical insect." On the office wall he keeps a picture of a pre-eminent Catholic churchman whom he calls "Johnny." He admits that he lives more like a hermit than a bishop. He has no servants, eats lunch out with priests or nuns, and for dinner has only a bowl of oatmeal-followed sometimes by a cigar and a glass of sherry...
Warning Wiggles. Working with infinite care, Roeder and Treat took a live moth, attached delicate wires to the nerves leading out of one of its ears, and connected the little insect to an amplifier and an oscillograph. Then they turned on an electronic generator that gave out brief bursts of ultrasonic sound-a reasonable imitation of a prowling bat. Even where the man-made beeps were too weak to be detected by man-made microphones, the moth's ear responded with electrical signals. When the imitation bat sounded louder, as if it were closing in, the moth...
Dives & Loops. To learn more about the moth's methods of escape, the two scientists set up a floodlight and trained a camera on its beam. When an insect flew across the floodlit area, the operators opened the camera's shutter and turned on their electronic beeper to simulate a cruising bat. "Many insects." say Roeder and Treat, "showed no change in flight pattern when they encountered the sound. In others, the changes in flight path were dramatic in their abruptness and bewildering in their variety. One of the commonest reactions was a sharp power dive into...