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Demons of the Dust: a Study in Insect Behaviour

Abstract

A STUDY of parallel development in behaviour between the worm-lions and ant-lions must be interesting and important. “A legless maggot and a six-legged Neuropteran larva equipped with powerful sucking mandibles, carry on, though by somewhat different methods, one and the same industry for the purpose of obtaining their food.” These are termed respectively the worm- and ant-lions. Their feeding is predatory, craters being made in loose sand, a larva lying partially hidden at the basal point of each. Ants and other small wanderers which stumble into these pits, slide in the sand and are at once grasped and sucked.

Demons of the Dust: a Study in Insect Behaviour.

By Prof. William Morton Wheeler. Pp. xviii + 378. (London: Kegan Paul and Co., Ltd., n.d.) 21s. net.

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GARDINER, J. Demons of the Dust: a Study in Insect Behaviour . Nature 129, 39–40 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129039a0

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