Dave Stanton

Hi Misha - not sure about reptiles, but in deserts: the Sahara Desert Ant (Cataglyphis bicolor) can forage at temperatures above 50 deg C (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7708762). Tardigrades can withstand even crazier temperatures (although not in deserts). With tardigrades it was thought that this may be related to high levels of horizontal gene transfer (http://www.pnas.org/content/112/52/15976.short although it seems that that original paper overestimated the extent that it occurred in the genome: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/04/14/1603862113.short) - something that we are hoping to look into with the Pontoscolex genome!