Word: larva
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...argument was that ... no insect which passes through the larva, nymph and imago cycle of life has ever . . . been able to pass on any experience to its progeny. All that such insects know is known absolutely perfectly by an instinct which must be the result of creation...
...scarab of Egypt (Atauchus sacer), for example, Fabre discovered, possesses the instinctive gift of making a perfect sphere of dung for its food and a perfect pear for its larva, even as the bee is born with the gift of making a hexagonal prism...
...process of evolution concerns Fabre's experiments with the mason bee, experiments suggested to Fabre by Darwin and made after the latter's death. The mason bee (Chalicodoma pyrenaica) builds a house of cement about as big as a thimble, fills it with honey, lays its larva, covers it over and then dies. Fabre took such houses that were built an inch apart and interchanged them, coloring with different colors each house and its bee for identification purposes. He then took the bees ... to a point three kilometers from home . . . When they were released at a predetermined hour...
...dauber's life cycle. One of the most striking was the insect's built-in sanitary facilities. Each egg is laid in a separate mud cell, along with perhaps a dozen spiders which have been paralyzed by the mother wasp's sting. After the larva hatches from the egg, it begins to eat the spiders...
...larva has a closed alimentary canal. All the waste matter from its heavy protein diet is stored in an internal sac until the baby mud dauber has finished its food store. Then the larva develops an anus and excretes the entire sac into a back compartment of its bedchamber. It seals off the narrow connecting passage with a blob of quick-hardening cement, secreted especially for the purpose, so that it can spend the winter hygienically in the clean, dry front chamber...