JeffreyRam

I learned a lot from your post about how a terrestrial animal (beetles) can adapt to full time life under water. One thing that particularly caught my eye was about how that places a limit on their sizes since we've been working recently on another type of animal that also evolved from a formerly terrestrial type of animal to became fully adapted in part of their life cycle to underwater life: water mites, whose nymph and adult stages are fully aquatic. As you can guess by the name, they are small--mitey small! Most are under 1 mm in diameter (even less in the dorsal-ventral dimension), and the largest I've read about are less than 5 mm in diameter. The respiratory system: "Paired stigmata ... lead to tracheal trunks which anastomose repeatedly into tracheolar tubules extending to all parts of the body. However, they appear to be nonfunctional in deutonymphs and adults, and respiration occurs by diffusion through the integument." If you have interest in integumental respiration, perhaps a comparative study in our water mites may be of interest? We can collect numerous species around Belle Isle and even more if we go further afield (and speaking of further afield: have you found water mites in the caves that you work in?).

Are any of the collection sites in Lake St. Clair or the Detroit River? You can communicate with me through my email, at jeffram@gmail.com

It depends on whether the temperature is raised gradually (e.g., three days at 15 C; then 3 days at 18 C; then 3 days at 21 C; then 3 days at 24 C; etc. If it is simply a temperature shock (one big step to the new temperature, I think 24 C will be the limit. However, with gradual acclimation over several days (per the sequence I described), your beetles will survive up to 29 C. [we have done acclimation experiments with zebra mussels, so this procedure is somewhat derived from our experience.].

A great discovery by Ron Kompka and an excellent follow-up by Hall, Rosbash, Young and their students and post-docs.