How to Use larva in a Sentence

larva

noun
  • The larva of a butterfly is called a caterpillar.
  • The egg hatches and the larva finds and invades the worm.
    Jeff Lowenfels, Anchorage Daily News, 17 Oct. 2019
  • The wasp larva eats the moth egg from the inside, and a wasp hatches.
    Theresa MacHemer, Smithsonian Magazine, 19 Feb. 2021
  • The larvae attach to the shells or rocks and begin to grow.
    Emily Matchar, Smithsonian, 10 Jan. 2018
  • The eggs hatch, and the new larvae burrow under the bark to start the cycle again.
    John Myers, Twin Cities, 17 Jan. 2017
  • Allen: Ticks have three life stages: larva, nymph, and adult.
    BostonGlobe.com, 22 Aug. 2019
  • The eggs hatch in seven to 10 days, and the larvae begin feeding on the turf.
    Dan Gill, NOLA.com, 29 July 2017
  • The surprise is that this larva can search for food at all.
    Quanta Magazine, 11 June 2020
  • But no one has yet cracked what food those larvae will eat.
    The Economist, 18 Dec. 2019
  • Adults don’t often feed on Heuchera leaves, but their larvae love the roots.
    Margaret Lauterbach, idahostatesman, 11 Apr. 2018
  • Each year, flurries of tiny sea star larvae spend the first stage of their life floating in the open ocean.
    Veronique Greenwood, New York Times, 18 June 2018
  • The hope here is that oyster larva will catch hold of the hard limestone rock and grow reefs there once again.
    Ike Morgan | Imorgan@al.com, al, 15 Aug. 2023
  • This larva is between about two and two and a half inches.
    Andrea Gawrylewski, Scientific American, 8 June 2022
  • Their larva can grow in soil and be passed along in whatever grows in that soil.
    Rebecca Kurson, Good Housekeeping, 17 Jan. 2018
  • The butterflies also use the plant as a home and a nursery for their larvae.
    Jacqueline L. Urgo, Philly.com, 30 Sep. 2017
  • The silkworm is the larva of Bombyx mori, the domestic silk moth.
    Shi En Kim, Smithsonian Magazine, 19 July 2021
  • The flies hatch from larvae that burrow in the lake sediment for two or three years, Wills said.
    Anna Bauman, Detroit Free Press, 21 June 2019
  • This larva belongs to tornaria, a kind of acorn worm that likes to live in plankton.
    Andrew Moseman, Discover Magazine, 20 Apr. 2010
  • The tree’s failure to kill this larva was a strike against its future in the breeding program.
    Gabriel Popkin, Science | AAAS, 12 Nov. 2020
  • But there hadn’t been enough time for the medusa in the bowl of seawater to spawn, grow into a larva, and end up a polyp over the weekend.
    Juli Berwald, Discover Magazine, 10 Nov. 2017
  • Loner bees leave a blob of pollen on the egg and wipe their hands of it, whereas social species dote on their larvae.
    Quanta Magazine, 6 May 2014
  • Named for its host plant, this native striped beetle can chew leaf holes as both an adult and a larva.
    Miri Talabac, Baltimore Sun, 16 Feb. 2023
  • The collective movement of all the segments causes the larva to turn.
    Quanta Magazine, 26 Feb. 2019
  • These larvae have hatched from a yellow-orange egg that was laid in a small cluster on a leaf.
    Margaret Lauterbach, idahostatesman, 24 May 2017
  • The plant produces the galls in reaction to the stings and the larvae develop within the gall tissues.
    Neil Sperry, San Antonio Express-News, 6 Apr. 2018
  • When the eggs hatch, larvae enter the leaves and begin to tunnel between the leaf surfaces.
    Tom MacCubbin, OrlandoSentinel.com, 29 June 2018
  • First, the wasp's tiny larvae hitch onto the spider's abdomen.
    David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 30 Apr. 2019
  • And those beetle larvae did draw in the Mojave bees, while the Oregon bees ignored them.
    John Timmer, Ars Technica, 12 Sep. 2018
  • These beetles are named for the lights that run down the female’s larva-like body, said to look like lights from train windows at night.
    National Geographic, 30 June 2018
  • Truman and his team wanted to know, in great anatomical detail, how much of the brain of a larva persists in that of an adult fly.
    Rivka Galchen, The New Yorker, 31 Aug. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'larva.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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