| Library / English Dictionary |
LARVA
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
Irregular inflected form: larvae
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
The immature free-living form of most invertebrates and amphibians and fish which at hatching from the egg is fundamentally unlike its parent and must metamorphose
Classified under:
Hypernyms ("larva" is a kind of...):
animal; animate being; beast; brute; creature; fauna (a living organism characterized by voluntary movement)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "larva"):
polliwog; pollywog; tadpole (a larval frog or toad)
grub (a soft thick wormlike larva of certain beetles and other insects)
bot (botfly larva; typically develops inside the body of a horse or sheep or human)
leptocephalus (slender transparent larva of eels and certain fishes)
nymph (a larva of an insect with incomplete metamorphosis (as the dragonfly or mayfly))
caterpillar (a wormlike and often brightly colored and hairy or spiny larva of a butterfly or moth)
caseworm (insect larva that constructs a protective case around its body)
dobson; hellgrammiate (large brown aquatic larva of the dobsonfly; used as fishing bait)
aphid lion; aphis lion (carnivorous larva of lacewing flies)
ant lion; antlion; doodlebug (the larva of any of several insects)
jointworm; strawworm (larva of chalcid flies injurious to the straw of wheat and other grains)
wiggler; wriggler (larva of a mosquito)
mealworm (the larva of beetles of the family Tenebrionidae)
wireworm (wormlike larva of various elaterid beetles; feeds on roots of many crop plants)
cercaria (tadpole-shaped parasitic larva of a trematode worm; tail disappears in adult stage)
bladder worm (encysted saclike larva of the tapeworm)
ascidian tadpole (free-swimming larva of ascidians; they have a tail like a tadpole that contains the notochord)
Derivation:
larval (immature of its kind; especially being or characteristic of immature insects in the newly hatched wormlike feeding stage)
larval (relating to or typical of a larva)
Context examples:
Lethal(2) giant larvae protein homolog 1 (1064 aa, ~115 kDa) is encoded by the human LLGL1 gene.
(Lethal(2) Giant Larvae Protein Homolog 1, NCI Thesaurus)
The jelly is the bee equivalent of mother’s milk: a secretion used to provide nutrition to worker and queen bee larvae.
(Discovery of RNA transfer through royal jelly could aid development of honey bee vaccines, University of Cambridge)
The prey is then transported back to the nest, where it is fed to the ants' larvae.
(Dracula Ant Found to Be Fastest Creature on Earth, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)
Instead, the larvae become attracted to sounds produced by the wrong sort of habitats or to artificial ‘white noise’.
(Fish larvae lose their way to safety in acidified oceans, SciDev.Net)
The scientists found that the larvae oriented to the magnetic northwest in the chamber, and, although deprived of all other environmental cues, oriented toward the same magnetic direction in the MagLab.
(North Atlantic haddock use magnetic compass to guide them, National Science Foundation)
After hatching in the Sargasso Sea, eel larvae move more than 5,000 kilometers with the Gulf Stream until they reach the continental slope off Europe.
(Study uncovers magnetic memory of European glass eels, National Science Foundation)
That's especially true for crustaceans and cephalopods, which are common prey for other animals and whose larvae migrate in the water column.
(Low ocean oxygen levels can blind sea creatures, National Science Foundation)
The researchers observed larvae of zebrafish — zebrafish share many anatomical similarities with humans and other vertebrates — with 3D microscopy as they were exposed to concentrations of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin at levels comparable to that often found in environmental samples.
(Impacts of low-dose exposure to antibiotics unveiled in zebrafish gut, National Science Foundation)
We have found that the larva of a common insect, Galleria mellonella, is able to biodegrade one of the toughest, most resilient, and most used plastics: polyethylene, says Federica Bertocchini of the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology of Cantabria in Spain.
(Plastic Eating Worm Could Help Ease Pollution, VOA)
But now a team of researchers have harnessed the power of this humble herb to attack the insect’s larvae before it can spread, using another common ingredient.
(Thyme oil and corn starch prove deadly for mosquito larvae, SciDev.Net)
