Description
The body of adult female is yellow and is covered with a rounded dark gray scale up to two millimetres in diameter. Over the course of two months, yellow crawlers are born viviparously and emerge from the back of the test at the rate of two or three a day. In bad weather they gather under their mother's scale. The crawlers disperse to other parts of the plant and start feeding. They moult after about ten days and begin to lose their eyes, legs and antennae. The adult female appears after the next moult and the scale develops, incorporating the larval exuviae. The development of the male involves three moults. The male nymph is more elongate than the female and the adult male is orange coloured and has wings. It lives only for a few hours.
Read more about this topic: San Jose Scale
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“The great object in life is Sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain; it is this “craving void” which drives us to gaming, to battle, to travel, to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“As they are not seen on their way down the streams, it is thought by fishermen that they never return, but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period; a tragic feature in the scenery of the river bottoms worthy to be remembered with Shakespeare’s description of the sea-floor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)