France is scrambling to make sure that that virus-carrying tiger mosquitos, a growing menace in Europe, don't spoil the Paris Olympics for athletes and fans, with millions of visitors due in the French capital for the summer ...
Mar 24, 2024
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The small team of state public health workers slalomed between auto parts strewn across a Rio de Janeiro junkyard, looking for standing water where mosquitoes might have laid their eggs.
Feb 16, 2024
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Can humans become infected with the rat lungworm parasite from snail slime, if an infected snail or slug leaves slime on a lettuce leaf? That is the question University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researchers set out to answer ...
Dec 18, 2023
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When the eye jumps from one point to another, the image of our surroundings rapidly passes across the retina and triggers a wave of neuronal activity. In order not to be overwhelmed by the sensory impressions produced by ...
Nov 30, 2023
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In mammals, including humans, scar tissue forms after injury to the spinal cord as part of the healing process. In mammals, however, this has a serious drawback: the scar tissue cannot be penetrated by regrowing nerves. As ...
Nov 10, 2023
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Local tumor-induced stress in fruit-fly larvae releases a signaling molecule that reprograms the metabolism of the animals, an all-RIKEN team has discovered. If the same thing happens in humans, it could lead to new ways ...
Oct 25, 2023
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Scientists investigating potential drugs to improve recovery from spinal cord injury have uncovered a promising route to new treatments.
Jun 19, 2023
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Ticks are extremely resilient even when temperatures vary wildly, according to scientists who are working to better understand the spread of Lyme disease.
Jun 5, 2023
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A new way of reprogramming our immune cells to shrink or kill off cancer cells has been shown to work in the otherwise hard to treat and devastating skin cancer, melanoma. The University of Bristol-led discovery, published ...
Oct 31, 2022
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A team of doctors at University Hospital of Saint-Etienne in France recently found that the source of an itchy eye reported by a gardener who turned up at their emergency department was due to the presence of maggot larvae ...
A larva (Latin; plural larvae) is a distinct juvenile form many animals undergo before metamorphosis into adults. Animals with indirect development such as insects, amphibians, or cnidarians typically have a larval phase of their life cycle. Larva is Latin for "ghost".
The larva's appearance is generally very different from the adult form (e.g. caterpillars and butterflies), and a larva often has unique structures and larval organs that do not occur in the adult form. A larva's diet can be considerably different from that of the adult form.
Larvae are frequently adapted to environments separate from adults. For example, some larvae such as tadpoles live exclusively in aquatic environments, but as adults can live outside water as frogs. By living in distinct environments, larvae may be given shelter from predators and reduce competition for resources with the adult population.
Animals in the larval stage will consume food to fuel their transition into the adult form. Some species such as barnacles are immobile as adults, and use their mobile larvae form to distribute themselves.
The larvae of some species can become pubescent and not further develop into the adult form (for example, in some newts). This is a type of neoteny.
It is a misunderstanding that the larval form always reflects the group's evolutionary history. It could be the case, but often the larval stage has evolved secondarily, as in insects. In these cases the larval form might differ more from the group's common origin than the adult form.
Names of various kinds of larvae:
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
