Winter climates and coldhardiness in terrestrial insects
By W. J. Turnock, P. Fields. 2005
113 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Overwintering insects must avoid injury and death from the freezing of tissues and from metabolic disruptions associated with exposure to low, non-freezing temperatures. The winter climates of the world are classified in relation to insect overwintering on the basis of their minimum temperatures and the duration of the winter (when temperatures are below the thermal range for activity and development). Outside the Tropical Wet zone, the severity of exposure to cold (temperature, snowfall, duration of expo- sure, predictability, variability) can vary from a few days at 0°C to months below -20°C with extremes as low as -60°C. The severity of the temperature exposure may be ameliorated by the selection by insects of overwintering sites (exposed, partly-exposed, protected). The relationships among overwintering habitats, the minimum winter temperature in climatic zones, and the supercooling points (SCP) of over 350 terrestrial insects from published reports were examined. Variability in the SCP among insects within each climatic zone and habitat was wide. Among the freeze-susceptible species that overwintered in exposed or partly-protected habitats the SCP and the cold severity of climate were correlated. This was not the case for insects that overwintered in protected habitats. The SCP's of freeze-tolerant insects were generally higher than the freeze-susceptible insects, and the SCP's were not tightly linked with the cold severity of climatic zone. Insects, both freeze-susceptible and freeze-tolerant, overwintering in exposed habitats had lower SCP's than insects from habitats that offered some protection from ambient temperatures. Thirty-eight species had reports of SCP's for different geographical locations. Although there were occasionally differences in the SCP's, there was no consistent pat- tern of insects having lower SCP's when overwintering in colder habitats. The incidence of freeze-tolerance was higher in boreal and polar climatic zones than in climatic zones with warmer winters. Holometabola insects had a higher incidence of freeze-tolerance than hemimetabola insects. Suggestions for future research directions are outlined.
Subfields: Ecology, Genetics, Insect Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb08b68fb9924cd5372680920198969ff53c1b7c
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Citations in the corpus
- Has Prey Availability for Arctic Birds Advanced with Climate Change? Hindcasting the Abundance of Tundra Arthropods Using Weather and Seasonal Variations (2009, background): “…freeze-thaw cycles may reduce the winter survival of insects, either by ice-crust formation leading to anoxic conditions or by loss of cold-hardiness during an early melt period followed by further freezing (Hodkinson et al., 1998; Sinclair et al., 2003; Hodkinson, 2005; Turnock and Fields, 2005).”
- The elements of seasonal adaptations in insects (2007, background): “Insects can be injured at low temperatures above 0 °C (“chilling injury”) — see Turnock and Fields (2005) and references cited therein.”