How Insects Survive Water and Rainfalls

in StemSocial23 hours ago

You are going out on a sunny afternoon and you just have this belief that it is going to be a sunny day only for the weather to change in about 30 minutes to a very cloudy one and the rain begins. As humans you have many options including finding a place to hide, staying under with rain, or use something as cover, but while rain looks pretty normal for us, it is not for some living things especially flying bugs and insects.

The weight of rain on these insects like mosquito is many times their own weight but they find a way to survive and fly in them. When rain hit humans, what we feel is an equal and opposite force that our body applies to the rain drop thanks to inertia that we have in excess compared to the rain's force but insects like Mosquitoes on the other hand do not resist rain drops rather, when they get hit, they go down along with the rain and so they always survive. A good example of an object that doesn't resist force is a balloon flying in the sky or on a free fall. A person trying to burst it by punching it will be doing a very difficult task because the balloon isn't resisting the force from the hand.


tppmcairns

For bigger flying insects like dragonfly, their wings are built in a way that water cannot stick to them and this is because they are super hydrophobic and so water cannot stick to them. While they have pores on their feathers, the water droplets are bigger than the pores because the pores are microscopic. Since water molecule has more cohesion than adhesion to the insect's wings, it doesn't stay on the wing because the wing surface is super hydrophobic. The super hydrophobic characteristics of the insects help them to reduce the contact time between the water and the insect which allows them to remain steady in the air.

So, we are done with land insect but then, it looks like we have insects in water which is very strange. Insects are suppose to be land creatures so when some of them live in water, it can be very surprising. Out of the about 900,000 known insect species and the about 5 million unknown but estimated insect species, there are only 5 insect species that lives in or on the ocean and are of the Genus Halobates and the species germanus, micans, sericeus, sobrinus, and splendens.


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The sea skaters (Halobates germanus) live in the ocean and in other for them to be alive, they must be able to survive massive storms without wind from the ocean since the ocean is rough compared to the rivers and streams. To do that, they possess certain adaptation like a double layer of specially groomed water repelling body hair known as Setae which they wax regularly. The setae and their exoskeleton body made of chitin makes them super hydrophobic preventing water from attaching to them.

Scientists are learning about these insects and how their superhydrophobic characteristics so as to develop rough super hydrophobic structures such as airplane parts, solar cells, and so on, so they can avoid water, and ice, as well as remain clean as the water would pick up debris as it rolls down the super hydrophobic surface.



For Further Reading








https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64563-7
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0606/Why-don-t-mosquitoes-get-squashed-by-raindrops-Scientists-find-an-answer https://askentomologists.com/2016/03/24/do-insects-get-trapped-in-water-drops-why-arent-they-constantly-drowning/ https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1205446109 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40544-022-0653-2 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9007337/ https://www.iflscience.com/waterrepellent-sea-skaters-are-100-times-faster-than-usain-bolt-56065

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