Word: insects
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...insect made its appearance on earth some 400 million years ago, and in the intervening time has become well equipped to survive. (In fact, the durable cockroach evolved into something very similar to its current unpleasant form some 320 million years ago and apparently saw little need for further improvement.) An insect has a strong exterior skeleton and seems disproportionately powerful in relation to its size (an ant can lift 50 times its own weight). Its capacity for flight (most but not all insects can fly), attained about 100 million years before the first flying reptiles or birds, enables...
...insect's life cycle is also an asset to its survival. Many insects are completely metamorphic, passing from egg through larval, pupal and sometimes suspended stages before developing into full-fledged adults that can then mate and start the process all over again. This enables them to take advantage of a wide variety of food supplies. Insect fecundity is frightening. Many species lay hundreds or thousands of eggs after each mating. Some pass through their entire life cycles, from egg to adult, in a matter of days or weeks, producing dozens of generations a season. This gives them an enormous...
...Insect senses are also highly specialized for survival...
...Some insects are also useful to man and important to agriculture. Nectar-sucking insects, especially bees, pollinate flowering plants, and bees are the source of the honey that sugar-loving humans consume in great quantities each year. Other insects are also considered beneficial. The attractive red and black ladybird beetle, or ladybug, celebrated in the nursery rhyme, eats aphids and other small insects?to the gardener's delight. Before the development of dyes made from coal-tar derivatives, a scale insect provided the world with red dye; other species of scale insects are still used in the manufacture of shellac...
...single most significant development in insect control was the discovery of a compound with the unpronounceable name of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or, as it came to be known, DDT. First synthesized in 1874, the chemical languished in the laboratory until 1939, when Chemist Paul Miiller of Switzerland's J.R. Geigy chemical company discovered its insecticidal properties. The U.S. Army considered the chemical so effective that it classified it "top secret," and first used it against a typhus epidemic in Naples, Italy, in 1943. It worked so well that the military promptly began applying DDT against a wide variety of insects responsible...