Habits
The larva resembles a caterpillar and grows up to 20 millimetres (0.79 in) long. it has three pairs of thoracic legs and eight pairs of prolegs.
The adult is seen between May and September, and can be usually found in hedgerows and patches of nettle. They eat dead insects (although they sometimes eat live aphids), sometimes taking them from spider webs.
Although fully winged, the adults rarely fly very far and spend much of their time crawling on vegetation in damp, shaded places near water and along hedgerows. Eggs are laid in soil annually and the larvae both scavenge and pupate there.
Read more about this topic: Panorpa Communis
Famous quotes containing the word habits:
“One may disavow and disclaim vices that surprise us, and whereto our passions transport us; but those which by long habits are rooted in a strong and ... powerful will are not subject to contradiction. Repentance is but a denying of our will, and an opposition of our fantasies.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The only ones who are really grateful for the war are the wild ducks, such a lot of them in the marshes of the Rhone and so peaceful ... because all the shot-guns have been taken away completely taken away and nobody can shoot with them nobody at all and the wild ducks are very content. They act as of they had never been shot at, never, it is so easy to form old habits again, so very easy.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century. Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them—as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)