Chigger, for one

Usage examples of larva.

How does the Ammophila, hovering over the turf and investigating it far and wide, in its search for a grey grub, contrive to discern the precise point in the depth of the subsoil where the larva is slumbering in immobility?

When the larvae are ready to pupate, the platens are placed in lightweight plastic boxes, three platens, or six thousand bees, to a box, in a colour-coded storage area.

Experiments with line-rearing of bees, discovered that a dysone made from goldenrod would speed the development of bees, Administered in larger quantities than the bees would receive from nature, it produced giant larvae that failed to mature.

On the balcony of my hotel room I examine those I can closely in the sun, wondering which of the swollen swaths of flesh contain the squirming larvae of the botfly the nun had so kindly warned me about on the flight into Belize.

My hand hurts from a bite, it is swelling with a frightening rapidity, and I suspect the botfly larva is squirming there beneath my skin.

One species can parasitize a hundred kinds of caterpillars, including budworms and cabbage white butterfly larvae.

But the larva of the Calosoma sycophanta, which feeds on the Processional caterpillar of the oak-tree, pays no heed to it, neither does the Dermestes, which feeds on the entrails of the Processional caterpillar of the pine-tree.

The larvae develop and multiply with great rapidity, and sometimes gain admission into the frontal sinus, causing intense cephalalgia, and even death.

Foreign figs are dried in the oven so as to destroy the larvae of the Cynips insect, and are then compressed into small boxes.

But this is almost certainly the disease cysticercosis, caused by the larva of Taenia solium.

Bembex, carrying their daily ration of diptera to her larvae, at the bottom of her burrow, deep in the fine sand.

Most of the insects, in all the foregoing cases, were Diptera, but with many minute Hymenoptera, including some ants, a few small Coleoptera, larvae, spiders, and even small moths.

In the first lot, my son examined seventeen bladders, including prey of some kind, and eight of these contained entomostracan crustaceans, three larvae of insects, one being still alive, and six remnants of animals so much decayed that their nature could not be distinguished.

If, on the other hand, it profited the young to follow habits of life in any degree different from those of their parent, and consequently to be constructed in a slightly different manner, then, on the principle of inheritance at corresponding ages, the active young or larvae might easily be rendered by natural selection different to any conceivable extent from their parents.

Finally, it may not be a logical deduction, but to my imagination it is far more satisfactory to look at such instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers,--ants making slaves,--the larvae of ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars,--not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.