SCIENCE LAB SCEPTRE : HEAT SHIELD

 

The locust's best pickup line : ' There's room under my umbrella.' It may seem like a hopeless place, but locusts find a way to breed in the scorching heat of the Sahara at midday.

These insects devour agricultural crops in swarms that number in the billions and stretch for miles. While they prefer to lay eggs in the desert's cooler evenings, new research shows that female desert locusts can produce eggs, even under the burning sun, with help from male partners.

The males keep them cool by climbing on their backs to act as living parasols.

The finding, published in the journal Ecology, could contribute to efforts to reduce the use of pesticides while trying to protect agriculture crops from locusts.

Desert locusts males have long been known to mount females to guard them from rivals for mating.  But this usually happens at night.

But the practice turns out to have an extra advantage during the day, when females may lay eggs in temperatures that exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit [49 Celsius]. That is '' an amazing thing,'' said Koutaro Ould Maeno, a locust expert in Japan and the author of the new study.

To test this theory, Dr. Maeno's team glued dead locusts to wooden sticks, alone or in pairs, and then recorded their body temperatures on the ground under the sun.

The results showed that the dead males serving as sun umbrellas made a difference. Shaded bodies of females had lower body temperatures than those of exposed females. [ Gennaro Tomma ]