(Medical Xpress)—A team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Janelia Farm Research Campus has developed a new technique for studying neural circuits that helps tie circuit activity to organism behavior. In their ...
(Medical Xpress)—When minor wounds heal, the fine nerve endings that sense touch, or control sweating, are usually able to regrow. Like many processes in the body, the ability to regenerate new tissues changes throughout ...
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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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 ...
Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a tiny robot that mimics the movement of a starfish larva. It is driven by sound waves and equipped with tiny hairs that direct the fluid around it, just like its natural model. In ...
Nov 9, 2021
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Inside cells, organelles called mitochondria carry out a medley of vital tasks. These structures generate energy and help to keep the cells' interior environment in a state of healthy equilibrium, among other functions.
Aug 18, 2021
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Scientists have long known that chronic stress experienced early in life, or even chronic prenatal exposure to maternal stress hormones in the womb, can shorten lifespan and contribute to age-related chronic diseases like ...
Sep 9, 2020
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New research from Oregon Health & Science University for the first time documents the presence of astrocytes in zebrafish, a milestone that will open new avenues of research into a star-shaped type of glial cell in the brain ...
Sep 9, 2020
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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
