Basic Guidelines For English Spellings
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Of an insect, especially a bee: collecting nectar from the flowers of only a few related plants. Contrasted with polytropic .
Late 19th century. From oligo- + -tropic, after German oligotrop, adjective.
Oligotrophic.
1940s; earliest use found in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Variant of oligotrophic, by association of the second element with -tropic.