#snowflies — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #snowflies, aggregated by home.social.
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Snow flies now less mysterious but even more fascinating:
"Coordinated molecular and physiological adaptations enable activity at sub-freezing temperatures in the snow fly Chionea alexandriana", Capek et al. (Stensmyr and Gallio labs).
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(26)00247-2How they stay alive, balancing resource expenditure and the need to remain not frozen:
"direct measurements reveal that snow flies produce brief bursts of endogenous heat in response to cooling at sub-freezing temperatures, indicating active thermogenic capacity."
And as always, lots to learn, in this case for medicine:
"our results demonstrate that Chionea has evolved mechanisms to cope with high levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS), a byproduct of mitochondrial activity and a hallmark of cold exposure."
#Snowflies #genetics #ColdAdaptations #thermogenesis #Chionea
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A grisly trick helps #SnowFlies survive freezing: self-amputation
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/trick-snow-flies-survive-self-amputation[#preprint] Snow #flies self-amputate freezing limbs to sustain behavior at sub-zero temperatures https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.29.541388v1.full [#preprint]
"When a leg begins to freeze, the #insects can rapidly self-amputate it, preventing ice crystals from creeping up into their bodies"
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Also at The Atlantic by the hand of no less than the legendary Ed Yong!
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/05/snow-flies-insects-glaciers/674240/
Freeze-tolerant flies that shed legs as a last-ditch effort to survive when these freeze. The hottest topic of the moment.
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Nice to see a major newspaper pick up entomology news:
“Snow fly in US and Canada can detach its legs to survive, research shows”
“Flies chilled to sub-zero temperatures amputate one or more of their six limbs to protect their internal organs”
Featuring @tuthill no less!
“It’s gruesome”, he says—ah the wonders of the insect world.
The paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.29.541388v1.full.pdf
By the way John; care to tell us about daddy long legs? To me that’s an opillion, a kind of spider. Not a fly!
#insects #entomology #SnowFlies #SnowFly #Diptera #CraneFlies