Word: insects
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...floor, old and young rose to dance, some lacking a certain fluidity, but all quite game. The lights from O'Shea's played on the waterfront outside the dance hall, and off in the mangroves of Marco Island an insect combo embellished the Spiro sound with a contrapuntal hum. It was all bloody romantic, and when a paddle-wheeler, the latest O'Shea expansion, came to berth with 100 or so diners aboard, they simply fell to working off their meals aerobically: a waltz to warm up, a jitterbug for the cardiovascular good, a waltz to cool down. "I never...
White and delicate, high tech yet oddly primitive, the plane looks like some elegant insect or a sleek, latter-day pterodactyl. With her reedlike central wing slicing across three slender cylinders, she might have been designed by an austere modern sculptor rather than an aeronautical engineer. In an age of space travel and supersonic flight, her mission is a throwback to a different kind of odyssey: to fly not faster, but longer. Not higher, but farther. Voyager is a flight of fancy, of quaint possibility...
...says the Other, eyeing a cockroach. "You go chase those papers, man. But be careful you don't catch any, those bastards get mean when you pin 'em down." So saying, he hurls the ladle at the insect which scampers under...
...third threat is a strain of fire ant called Solenopsis invicta that was discovered this year in northern Alabama, northern Mississippi and Oklahoma. Until now the insects, which first entered the U.S. five decades ago, had been confined to a warm-weather belt between Lubbock, Texas and Beaufort, N.C. Invicta has managed to make a different but equally menacing adaptation. The species has begun nesting in supercolonies, insect megalopolises that contain 10 million to 20 million ants. Says Clifford Lofgren of the USDA'S Agricultural Research Service: "Larger colonies eat crops such as soybeans, potatoes and other vegetables. They have...
...vigilance that these formidable bugs have slipped across the border. The USDA employs 1,000 inspectors at 85 ports of entry nationwide. At J.F.K. ten officials examine as many as 2,000 crates of flowers, vegetables, seeds and cuttings every day and pass any pests they find to an insect identifier, a botanist and a plant pathologist for cataloging. An additional 60 inspectors are assigned to the airport's five international- arrivals areas, where they watch for illegal agricultural material in the bags of passengers filing through Customs. But increased travel and shipping have strained these resources. In the past...