How Can Overwintering Bumblebee Queens Survive Underwater?
"A lab accident serendipitously revealed that bumblebee queens can live underwater for up to a week."
#Bumblebees #physiology #ecology #Diapause #metabolism https://grrlscientist.medium.com/how-can-overwintering-bumblebee-queens-survive-underwater-3f868764c6bd
How Can Overwintering Bumblebee Queens Survive Underwater?
"A lab accident serendipitously revealed that bumblebee queens can live underwater for up to a week."
#Bumblebees #physiology #ecology #Diapause #metabolism https://grrlscientist.medium.com/how-can-overwintering-bumblebee-queens-survive-underwater-3f868764c6bd
How Can Overwintering Bumblebee Queens Survive Underwater?
"A lab accident serendipitously revealed that bumblebee queens can live underwater for up to a week."
#Bumblebees #physiology #ecology #Diapause #metabolism https://grrlscientist.medium.com/how-can-overwintering-bumblebee-queens-survive-underwater-3f868764c6bd
How Can Overwintering Bumblebee Queens Survive Underwater?
"A lab accident serendipitously revealed that bumblebee queens can live underwater for up to a week."
#Bumblebees #physiology #ecology #Diapause #metabolism https://grrlscientist.medium.com/how-can-overwintering-bumblebee-queens-survive-underwater-3f868764c6bd
The #dockbug #Coreus #marginatus (#Coreidae) is distributed from Europe to Asia. In #CentralEurope, it undergoes one generation per year, with the adults spending their #winter #diapause in hidden places. From October onwards, it can be found e.g. on the underside of #deadwood, as seen here in #Berlin's park Rehberge. T. O. Markova et al. (2020) did studies on the ecology of the #FarEast #subspecies C. m. orientalis.
©#StefanFWirth Bln 2025
Ref
https://doi.org/10.1134/S0013873820050048
Photos
© S.F. Wirth
The potential for lab fly husbandry are high:
"By late August, most adults are in diapause and reproduction ceases. Like many species of Drosophila in temperate regions, there may be only one generation produced per year. This is likely facilitated by the ability to diapause."
Imagine enabling a Drosophila melanogaster to "diapause" in the freezer instead of having to actively maintain their populations by flipping their bottles into new food every two weeks.
The savings by the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center alone would be huge.
How do insects count time in the cold? Toxopeus et al. showed that the duration of diapause (winter dormancy) can be modelled in the apple maggot fly using principles of physiological time, assuming that diapause development rate is temperature sensitive.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/729515
To accurately predict species’ phenology under climate change, we need to gain a detailed mechanistic understanding of how different environmental cues interact to produce the seasonal timing response. In the winter moth (Operophtera brumata), seasonal timing of egg hatching is strongly affected by ambient temperature and has been under strong climate change-induced selection over the past 25 years. However, it is unclear whether photoperiod received at the egg stage also influences timing of egg hatching. Here, we investigated the relative contribution of photoperiod and temperature in regulating winter moth egg development using two split-brood experiments. We experimentally shifted the photoperiod eggs received by 2–4 weeks compared to the actual calendar date and measured the timing of egg hatching, both at a constant temperature and in combination with two naturally changing temperature treatments – mimicking a cold and a warm year. We found an eight-fold larger effect of temperature compared to photoperiod on egg development time. Moreover, the very small photoperiod effects we found were outweighed by both between- and within-clutch variation in egg development time. Thus, we conclude that photoperiod received at the egg stage does likely not play a substantial role in regulating the seasonal timing of egg hatching in the winter moth. These insights into the regulatory mechanism of seasonal timing could have important implications for predicting insect climate change adaptation, as we might expect different targets of selection depending on the relative contribution of different environmental cues.
IOB
"Here, we asked if the diet composition queens received prior to diapause affected #diapause survival and post-diapause #reproductive performance using the bumble #bee B. impatiens."
by Treanore et al
https://doi.org/10.1093/iob/obad014
#science #macronutrients #biology
Image from
https://beespotter.org/topics/bio/Bombus/impatiens/index.html
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Stefan F. Wirth
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