What is it about?
Oceans cover more than 70% of the Earth’s surface where an amazing collection of whales, porpoises, birds, and fish can be sighted at sea, but insects, the world’s most common animals, seem to be completely absent. Appearances can deceive, however, as 5 species of the ocean skater Halobates live exclusively at the ocean surface. Discovered 200 years ago, these peppercorn-sized insects remain rather mysterious. How do they cope with life at the ocean surface, and why are they the only genus of insects to have taken to the high seas?
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Why is it important?
Why is it that only 5 among millions of insects known in the World are found at the ocean surface? They are tiny, totally wingless, with oval bodies and long legs. Adults are the size of black peppercorns. How do they manage to survive stormy seas, breaking waves, torrential rains, hurricane winds, UV radiation and heat from the sun with absolutely no shades to be found and nowhere to hide?
Perspectives
These unique ocean insects were first discovered in 1822, some 200 years ago during an oceanographic expedition but little effort had been made to discover how they manage to avoid drowning, protect themselves from damaging effects of UV and sunlight, find food, mates and to survive and reproduce in one of the harshest environments in the World. I happened to be an entomologist who landed at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD, which gave me an opportunity to study these insects on ocean expeditions. I have spent almost 5 decades studying them and was able to learn quite a lot about their distribution, life history, general biology, special adaptations, phylogeny etc, with the collaboration of dozens of collaborators. However, the most important aspects of their ability to survive on the ocean surface still elude us. My collaboration with Dr. Himanshu Mishra at KAUST will enable us to push the frontiers of research on Halobates and hopefully to discover the secrets of their abilities to survive on the ocean surface
Lanna Cheng
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Why did only one genus of insects, Halobates, take to the high seas?, PLoS Biology, April 2022, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001570.
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Resources
Jump sequence of Halobates
Source - Mahadik, G.A., Hernandez-Sanchez, J.F., Arunachalam, S. et al. Superhydrophobicity and size reduction enabled Halobates (Insecta: Heteroptera, Gerridae) to colonize the open ocean. Sci Rep 10, 7785 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-64563-7 (This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. )
Jumping Halobates
Mahadik, G.A., Hernandez-Sanchez, J.F., Arunachalam, S. et al. Superhydrophobicity and size reduction enabled Halobates (Insecta: Heteroptera, Gerridae) to colonize the open ocean. Sci Rep 10, 7785 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-64563-7 (This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.)
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