Word: moths
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Loeb first attracted public attention by showing that tropisms govern some kinds of animal behavior as strictly as they had been shown to govern plant behavior by his teachers. (A tropism is an automatic, mechanical orientation of an organism in response to some controlling factor in its environment. A moth which can fly only toward a light and a plant which can grow only in the direction of light both show positive phototropisms...
...learn the purpose of such moth clicks, Dunning and Roeder caged the insects in front of a loudspeaker and exposed them to batlike trains of ultrasonic pulses. At once the moths started clicking in what seemed to be an effort to confuse an oncoming bat. To test the effectiveness of the countermeasure, Dunning and Roeder built an electrically operated gun that tosses live meal worms on short trajectories. They trained captive bats to find the meal worms by echolocation, and to pick them skillfully out of the air. Then the entomologists recorded the clicks made by moths and played them...
Roeder and Dunning are not quite sure why the trick works. The moth's sounds may convey the message that the sender is not good to eat, or in some way they may deceive the bat's echo-location system. Whatever the moth clicks do, they are as effective as any man-made radar jammer...
...responded by conventionally snubbing Françe when they met. It did not bother him a bit that his first wife, Olga, trailed Françe around the streets. He even kept an entire apartment in Paris, where he had lived with Olga, intact. His suits were still there, moth-eaten to the seams; paintings were slathered with inches of dust. But Pi casso regarded it as a kind of album of his first marriage. Taken to see it, Françe began to think of Picasso as some sort of Bluebeard. Writes she: "I began to have the feeling...
...woolly slug is concentrated in eleven states from Maryland to Missouri and Texas, but it has close kin in the Northeast: the caterpillar of the white moth, Lagoa crispata. Other common stingers are the range and saddleback caterpillars, and those of the buck, lo, tussock and brown-tail moths. Where the caterpillars are especially abundant, their hairs may fly through the air in such numbers as to bring on asthma attacks in children who never even touch the beast directly...