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Insectivorous   Listen
adjective
Insectivorous  adj.  Feeding or subsisting on insects; carnivorous. The term is applied:
(a)
to Plants which have some special adaptation for catching and digesting insects, as the sundew, Venus's flytrap, Sarracenia, etc.
(b)
to The Insectivora, and many bats, birds, and reptiles.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Insectivorous" Quotes from Famous Books



... to keep insects in check, are wantonly shot by lazy boys and indolent men, who range the fields and forests, killing all, from the humming-bird to the crow. Legislative enactments made expressly to protect the insectivorous songsters are every day violated with impunity. One man plants an orchard and does all he can to destroy noxious insects; another man near him also has an orchard, but his orchard serves no purpose but to propagate "curculios," "canker-worms," "bark-lice," "tent caterpillars," "codling moths," ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot

... afterwards a vast number of winged males and females issue forth, the females measuring two and a quarter inches in expanse of wing, though the males are much smaller. Few of them, however, escape to enjoy existence, for they are immediately set upon by numbers of insectivorous animals and devoured. The few females who escape become ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston

... superficial study would at once convince us that, among the orders of placental mammals, neither the Whales, nor the hoofed creatures, nor the Sloths and Ant-eaters, nor the carnivorous Cats, Dogs, and Bears, still less the Rodent Rats and Rabbits, or the Insectivorous Moles and Hedgehogs, or the Bats, could claim our ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... eighteen species, among which is the Raven, which here takes the place of the Crow, the two species not being able to live together, as the stronger robber drives away the weaker. Of the insectivorous birds, some sixty or seventy species are found here, among which is the Mocking-Bird, in the middle and southern districts. Thirty-five to forty species of granivorous birds, among which we occasionally find in winter that rare Arctic bird, the Evening Grosbeak. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various

... Yangtsze-kiang is generically identical with its Mississippi relative. The spoon-beaked sturgeon of the Yangtsze and Hwang-ho is, however, now separated, as Psephurus, from the closely allied American Polyodon. Among insectivorous mammals the Chinese and Japanese shrew-moles, respectively forming the genera Uropsilus and Urotrichus, are represented in America by Neurotrichus. The giant salamander of the rivers of China and Japan and the Chinese ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... there are, we learn, hundreds of varieties of insectivorous plants: the Venus fly-trap, known otherwise as the Dionaea Muscipula, which has a leaf hinged in the median line, with teeth-like bristles. The two portions of the leaf snap together with considerable force when an insect alights upon the surface, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various

... there shall be no delay this time in thanking you for your interesting and long letter received this morning. I am sure that you will excuse brevity when I tell you that I am half-killing myself in trying to get a book ready for the press. (267/1. The MS. of "Insectivorous Plants" was got ready for press in March, 1875. Darwin seems to have been more than usually oppressed by the work.) I quite agree with what you say about advantages of various degrees of importance being co-selected (267/2. Mr. Chauncey Wright wrote (February ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... spiritual life. To look in this direction for the protoplasm of the spiritual life is consistent with all analogy. The lowest or mineral world mainly supplies the material—and this is true even for insectivorous species—for the vegetable kingdom. The vegetable supplies the material for the animal. Next in turn, the animal furnishes material for the mental, and lastly the mental for the spiritual. Each member of the series is complete only when the steps below it are complete; the highest demands all. It ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... plague of the caterpillars of the winter-moth, due to the destruction of insect-eating birds by the great frost; the caterpillars devoured the young leaves of the plum-trees, so that whole orchards were completely stripped. The balance between insectivorous birds and caterpillar life was destroyed for a time, and the caterpillars conquered the plum-trees. In 1917, during the persistent north-east blasts of February, March, and part of April, the destruction of birds was terrible; all the tit ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... frequently met with in Mexico. It is closely allied to the Bear family, but is much smaller and more active, and is both carnivorous and insectivorous. It climbs trees with ease, and, whenever it takes up its abode near any habitation, makes incessant raids upon poultry. It is tamed without difficulty, and will run to meet its master, and seems to value his caresses; yet, like the squirrel, which it resembles in its vivacity, it will ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart



Words linked to "Insectivorous" :   flora, animate being, brute, plant, plant life, carnivorous, omnivorous, creature, myrmecophagous, animal, beast



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