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The discovery that bumblebee queens could shake it off and emerge unscathed after more than a week submerged in water Now, a new paper reveals how they do it. Included in the bumblebee survival toolkit is the remarkable ability to extract oxygen from the water around them – literally allowing them to breathe underwater temporarily.
It's a skill set that can help the heart of a colony weather a crisis such as a flooded burrow, allowing her to survive and rebuild when conditions are more stable. And its discovery suggests that some species may have hidden reserves of resilience againstled by evolutionary physiologist Charles Darveau of the University of Ottawa in Canada,"reveal a remarkable flooding-tolerance strategy and provide a foundation for exploring the limits, mechanisms, and ecological significance of underwater survival in terrestrial insects."Burrows do not always remain safe and snug, though. Underground resting places can be vulnerable to flooding, and a bumblebee in diapause is too sluggish to respond with the alacrity that such an emergency would demand. Weather events such as heavy rain, snowmelt, and rising water tables can all inundate a bee burrow, not necessarily regularly, but unpredictably, and with enough risk that at least one North American species,Now, we finally get to find out how they did it: through a combination of underwater respiration, anaerobic metabolism, and"profoundIn laboratory experiments on dozens of queens in winter diapause, the researchers submerged the bumblebees in cold water and monitored their metabolism and gas exchange. Gas exchange was measured in the water in which the bees were submerged, and in the air in the chamber above the water. The researchers tracked carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, and found that the former rose minutely, while the latter fell. This is consistent with respiration – the bees were taking in oxygen from the water and expelling carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, submerged bees displayed a buildup of lactate. When the body can't get enough oxygen, cells switch to a metabolic process that generates energy without oxygen. Finally, that metabolism is pushed to the bare minimum required for survival. Diapause already slashes a queen's metabolism by more than 95 percent. Submersion slashes it even further. Using Before submersion, diapausing bees were producing around 15.42 microliters of carbon dioxide per hour per gram of body mass. After eight days underwater, this production rate had dropped to 2.35 microliters, or about one-sixth of its original value. Together, these processes allow the queens to take in oxygen from the water around them while keeping their energy needs extremely low.extracts oxygen from the water; they believe the queens make use of a physical gill, a thin layer of trapped air that exchanges gases with the water, but have yet to confirm this."Future studies manipulating water conditions and the likely physical gill, alongside detailed recovery analyses, will further clarify the adaptations enabling queens to withstand extended submersion,"
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