leaf miner

短編 "The Care Taker" に出てきた表題の単語は直ぐに覚えられそうです。
"You are, what, fifteen years old? You cannot drive to South America. You would be kidnapped. You would run out of petrol." He laughs, then, and puts his hand over his mouth. After a moment he begins to work, his fingers prying a leaf miner from the underside of a melon. Belle studies her map in the paling light.
"leaf miner" ですが、何でこんなところに "miner" が出てくるのかと不思議に思いました。"leaf miner" を辞書で調べます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A small fly, moth, beetle, or sawfly whose larvae burrow between the two surfaces of a leaf.: They help to repel leaf miner moths and some gardeners even find them effective against grasshoppers.
・Collins Dictionary: any of various insect larvae that bore into and feed on leaf tissue, esp the larva of dipterous flies of the genus Philophylla (family Trypetidae) and the caterpillar of moths of the family Gracillariidae: Dacnusa sibirica is an endoparasite which parasitizes by laying an egg in the leaf miner larva.
・Wikipedia: A leaf miner is the larva of an insect that lives in and eats the leaf tissue of plants. The vast majority of leaf-mining insects are moths (Lepidoptera), sawflies (Symphyta) and flies (Diptera), though beetles and wasps also exhibit this behavior.
なるほど、葉に筋模様をつけるあの害虫の事を指しているのですね。知ってしまうと実に分かり易い名称だと感心します。