The Antarctic midge has clearly evolved to survive in extreme conditions, yet a warming climate could threaten its existence.
The Antarctic midge might be smaller than a pea, but it’s the continent’s largest land animal–and only native insect. The midge has clearly evolved to survive in extreme conditions, yet a warming climate could threaten its existence, a new study finds.
Unlike temperate-zone midges that swarm around water, the Antarctic midge is flightless and lives in moist pockets of earth on the Antarctic peninsula and nearby islands. It also lives at a slower pace, taking 2 years to complete its life cycle and spending most of its life as a larva. The brown, wormlike juveniles “are not remarkable in appearance,” says Nicholas Teets, an insect physiologist at the University of Kentucky and an author of the study.
The midge has had 40 million years to perfect its survival strategy. It withstands the brutal winter temperatures the same way eccentric billionaires preserve themselves in science fiction movies—they freeze. To prevent internal tissue damage by ice crystals,. Once their bodies are frozen, the larvae spend about 6 months in a suspended state called diapause, during which they don’t eat, move, or do much of anything.
With Antarctica warming fast as a result of climate change, Teets and colleagues wondered how small changes in winter temperatures might affect the midges. To find out, they collected larvae from several islands off mainland Antarctica and placed them in incubators set at three temperatures: –5°C , –3°C , and –1°C .
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