Word: moth
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Circumnavigator Sir Francis Chichester, 69, plans to set out from Plymouth, England, this week for an assault on the singlehanded seaman's equivalent of the four-minute mile. In the improbable event that everything goes as he hopes it will, Chichester and his 57-ft. Gypsy Moth V will make Bissau, Portuguese Guinea, in 18 days, then cover the 4,000 miles of Atlantic to San Juan del Norte, Nicaragua, in 20 days−an astonishing average of 200 singlehanded miles sailed every day. The 1968 transatlantic race was won at a daily average 109.8 miles. "To increase...
Another choreographer of the company, Manzell Senters, constructs a mood like Henri Rousseau's scenes in the jungle. Against the dark stage, whitish costumes emphasize body movement. There's mystery in the topicality of rhythm-an old African legend of a moth's metamorphosis into a maiden...
Before the smoke and soot from the burning coal and wood of the Industrial Revolution began to blacken the bark of England's trees, the predominant variety of peppered moth had light-colored, speckled wings that blended perfectly with lichen-covered tree bark and camouflaged the insects against predatory birds. A mutant form of the moth, with black wings, was easily spotted against the light-colored tree bark, picked off and eaten. The surviving black moths were so rare, in fact, that the first one was not captured until...
...tree trunks grew progressively blacker, however, it became easier for birds to see and prey upon the speckled variety of the peppered moth. The once-vulnerable black moth, becoming indistinguishable against the darkening bark, found it easier to survive and multiply. By 1900, black peppered moths outnumbered the speckled variety by 99 to 1. Between 1952 and 1964, in a continuing survey made near one industrial town, not a single speckled moth was found. Eventually, this example of evolutionary forces at work became standard fare in college biology courses, illustrating the adaptability of organisms to a changing environment...
Zoologists Laurence Cook and Richard Askew of Manchester University, and James Bishop of Liverpool University intermittently collected moths from 1966 to 1969 in the same area where the previous survey had been made. The results, they report in Nature, are "very highly significant." Of the 972 specimens collected, 25 were of the speckled variety, a clear indication that the peppered moth is again in the process of changing...