Antarctica's sole native insect
Belgica antarctica, Antarctica's only endemic insect and a harmless true fly; female left, male right.
Antarctica's climate is so extreme, a small black wingless true fly is its only native insect. To survive there, it has had to evolve a unique suite of physiological processes, which have only recently become understood through the research of an international team led by Osaka University Graduate School of Science professor Shin Goto and Dr Mizuki Yoshida, a graduate student at Osaka when this research was completed.
They discovered the small, roughly 7mm-long fly Belgica antarctica Jacobs, 1900 (order Diptera, family Chironomidae), during its two-year life cycle, copes with the South Pole seasons by using facultative quiescence during its first season and obligate diapause the following year. Quiescence is a temporary slowing down of metabolism and general activity whereby an insect barely moves and may not eat for a long time. This state is induced by unfavourable temperatures, humidity, snow, lack of food, or other factors. Obligate diapause is an inborn dormant period in an insect's life cycle that has evolved so that it may survive a period of harsh environmental conditions.
Dr Yoshida and his team successfully developed a laboratory technique to rear the Antarctic fly for six years to discover its environmental adaptations and mechanisms. In the first year, the larvae undergo quiescence, so they can rapidly continue development whenever it quickly becomes warmer. During late autumn in their second year, the larvae enter their fourth and final larval stage, but rather than turning into a pupa, the larvae quickly enter genetically conditioned obligate diapause, a mandatory hibernation that enables them all to emerge at the same time as adults, quickly find mates and lay eggs, for which they have but a few days before the short summer arrives. The fly's obligate diapause ends with the onset of the low temperatures of winter, so the larvae all pupate at the same time and emerge as adult flies at the same time.
Prof Goto said this combination of quiescence and obligate diapause had not been previously reported in an animal and suggested insects living in harsh environments such as on mountaintops and on the Antarctic likely used similar strategies. The Antarctic fly spends most of its two years as a larva. Overwintering can happen in any of its four larval stages.
The larva eats algae, fungi, decaying vegetation and micro-organisms. Adults do not feed. Emerging in spring, they live at most for 10 days. Females mate on their first day and lay a single batch of eggs a few days later. The female secretes a jelly on the eggs that protects against both freezing and dehydration as well as providing food for newly hatched larvae. Mating occurs in large groups of males similar to the familiar, swarming "midge dances" of winged, flying midges in temperate zones. B. antarctica has many unusual features, including the smallest genome of any known insect, having only 99 base pairs.
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