Sunday, September 2, 2007

Larva

• Your continued donations keep Wikipedia running! •
• Learn more about using Wikipedia for research •

Larva

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
For other uses, see Larva (disambiguation).
The caterpillar of Proserpinus proserpina, an insect larva
The caterpillar of Proserpinus proserpina, an insect larva

A larva (Latin; plural larvae) is a juvenile form of animal with indirect development, undergoing metamorphosis (for example, insects or amphibians).

The larva can look completely different from the adult form, for example, a caterpillar differs from a butterfly. Larvae often have special (larval) organs which do not occur in the adult form. The larvae of some species can become pubescent and not further develop into the adult form (for example, in some newts). This is called 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.

The early life stages of most fish species are considerably different from juveniles and adults of their species and are called larvae.

Names of various kinds of larvae:

Animal Name of larvae
Hydrozoa planula
Freshwater mussels glochidium
Many crustaceans nauplius
Decapoda zoea
Butterflies and moths caterpillar
Beetles grub, triangulin
Flies maggot
Mosquitos wiggler
Bees schadon
Fish (generally) larva
Lamprey ammocoete
Eels leptocephalus
Amphibians tadpole, polliwog
Certain Mollusca, annelids trochophore
Dragonflies and Grasshoppers nymph
This developmental biology article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larva"
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)