Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Feeding on plants or plant material. Used especially of insects.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Plant-eating; feeding on plants; herbivorous; specifically, of or pertaining to the Phytophaga, in any sense. Also phytophagan and phytophagic.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective (Zoöl.) Feeding on plants; herbivorous.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective zoology feeding on plants, herbivorous

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective (of animals) feeding on plants

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Outside the sun broke through the rain clouds, and as the sunlight spilled in through the kitchen window, there was earthworm blood and phytophagous stew everywhere.

    Caterpillars in love. Khaver Siddiqi 2010

  • She checked on the phytophagous stew, her spiracles told her that it was almost done.

    Caterpillars in love. Khaver Siddiqi 2010

  • Mr Caterpillar jerked his head and thorax back, and then whipped it forward in a whiplash maneuver, shoving Mrs Caterpillar onto her stove, her phytophagous stew splashing all over her kitchen floor — completely wasted.

    Caterpillars in love. Khaver Siddiqi 2010

  • The herbivore-based system in most tundra habitats is dominated by one or two lemming species, while the abundance of phytophagous (plant-eating) insects relative to plant biomass is small on arctic tundra.

    Arctic environments north of the treeline 2009

  • The herbivore-based trophic system in most tundra habitats is dominated by one or two lemming species [74] while the abundance of phytophagous (plant-eating) insects relative to plant biomass is low in arctic tundra [75].

    Effects of changes in climate and UV radiation levels on structure of arctic ecosystems in the short and long term 2009

  • So, it also unknown whether the phytophagous insects and mites are able to survive such a “bottleneck” in the willow population, or for how long they can survive these restricted conditions.

    Human impacts on the biodiversity of the Arctic 2009

  • These include colonial fossorial rodents (marmots, ground squirrels) large birds of prey, and phytophagous insects (grasshoppers).

    Kazakh steppe 2008

  • Same with lignivorous/xylophagous, herbivorous/phytophagous, and of course carnivorous/sarcophagous.

    languagehat.com: VEGAN. 2005

  • They represent a wide spectrum of habitat requirements; terrestrial, aquatic, carnivorous and phytophagous species and many more with subtle dependences of specialist biotopes.

    Bürger and Cubasch: Are multiproxy climate reconstructions robust? « Climate Audit 2005

  • In general, it can be said that neem products are medium - to broadspectrum pesticides of plant-eating (phytophagous) insects.

    5 Effects on Insects 1992

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