A few winters ago, Todd Sformo was out gathering hibernating insects from the woods near the Fairbanks International Airport. He searched for dead balsam poplar trees, looking for a beetle that spends its winters under the loose bark, exposed to the frigid air.
“It’s simultaneously freeze-tolerant and freeze-avoiding,” said Sformo, who earned his doctorate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Institute of Arctic Biology in the lab of Professor Brian Barnes. Sformo now works as a biologist with the North Slope Borough in Utqiaġvik. Because he was testing the fungus gnats in the same bath as the red flat bark beetles, Sformo lowered the temperature to an extreme of about 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
Adult fungus gnats look sort of like mosquitoes, with a head and chest up front, and a cigar-shaped abdomen behind. Sformo wanted to see if a certain part was freezing before the other, so he snipped in half several fungus gnats.
Teeny tiny Alaskan Parkys?
That pic almost looks like prince harry
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