from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- n. Any of various small wingless insects of the order Collembola, having abdominal appendages that act as springs to catapult them through the air. Also called collembolan.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. Any of various wingless insects, of the order Collembola, that have spring-like legs.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. Any one of numerous species of small apterous insects belonging to the order Thysanura. They have two elastic caudal stylets which can be bent under the abdomen and then suddenly extended like a spring, thus enabling them to leap to a considerable distance. See collembola, and podura.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A collembolous thysanurous insect which leaps or skips about by means of abdominal hairs acting like a spring, as any poduran.
- n. A thysanurous insect of the suborder Cinura, oftener called bristletail. See Cinura, Lepisma, and cut under silver fish.
- n. One of certain minute neuropterous insects of the panorpid genus Boreus, found in moss and on the surface of snow; a snow-fly. This insect springs, but not by means of anal appendages.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- n. any of numerous minute wingless primitive insects possessing a special abdominal appendage that allows the characteristic nearly perpetual springing pattern; found in soil rich in organic debris or on the surface of snow or water
Sorry, no etymologies found.
She felt bugs crawling under her skin, and one day, she said, she pulled a worm out of her eyeball and coughed up a springtail fly.
Moreover, there is experimental evidence that population densities of numerically dominant tundra Collembola (springtail) species such as '' Folsomia quadrioculata '' and '' Hypogastrura tullbergi '' can be halved following an episode of freezing rain on Spitzbergen .
While conducting ecological inventories of 30 caves on the Colorado Plateau of northern Arizona, research by Wynne and Voyles has resulted in the discovery of at least 10 new species, including a new species of spider, a new genus of cave cricket (Family Rhaphidophoridae), possibly two new cricket species, a new barklouse (Psocoptera) species, a new beetle species, and possibly two new springtail species (Collembola).
A glacier species of particular note is the glacier flea Isotoma saltans, a species of springtail.
He said the island was home to 16 springtail species, five of which were invaders thought to have been introduced following the establishment of the South African scientific station on the island in
I saw this little springtail—barely a millimeter long—sitting on a mushroom on a rotting trunk in the woods last weekend.
I've never seen a springtail that looked quite like that.
The No. 1 offender on his top 10 list is an animal most people have never heard of but obviously find commonly: a tiny arthropod called a springtail.
And there was a springtail, too; a different kind, one I haven't seen before.
Labels: globular springtail, slime mold, springtails