grub

Any of several dipteran species (botfly family Oestridae or the family Hypodermatidae), widespread in Europe and North America. The warble flies Hypoderma lineatum and H. bovis, also called cattle grubs or heel flies, are large, heavy, and beelike. They deposit their eggs on the legs of cattle. The larvae penetrate the skin, migrate through the body, and produce a lump, or warble, on the animal's back. Mature grubs emerge and drop to the ground to pupate. Warbles contain breathing holes, which reduce the hide's commercial value. One species (Oedemagena tarandi) is a reindeer pest that also causes economic losses.

Learn more about warble fly with a free trial on Britannica.com.

Grub can refer to:

Slang

• Larva, most commonly of the scarabaeoidea (beetles) superfamily
• a slang term for food; also as a verb to scavenge for food
• a British word for a headless set screw

Places

• Grub AR, Grub, canton of Appenzell, Switzerland
• Grub am Forst, a town in the district of Coburg in Bavaria, Germany
• Grub, Thuringia, a municipality in the district of Hildburghausen in Thuringia, Germany

Computing

• GNU GRUB, the GNU project's bootloader software
• Grub (search engine), a distributed search crawler platform
• In Yahoo email group management terminology, a "grub" sometimes means a Yahoo email group that was formerly a club

People

• Grub Smith, British television presenter