water scorpion

British

noun

any of various long-legged aquatic insects of the heteropterous family Nepidae, which breathe by means of a long spinelike tube that projects from the rear of the body and penetrates the surface of the water

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Example Sentences

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"We've got damselflies and dragonflies, little water boatmen, whirligig beetles, water scorpions and because of all of them, we get all the birds that feed off them," he says.

From BBC

We have already noted the size of the earlier water scorpions.

From Project Gutenberg

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023