Tiny Bug Found Living in Yellowstone’s Thermal Pools Leads To One-Of-A-Kind Discovery
Life can’t exist without liquid water, oxygen, and carbon matter. This is what most scientists believed, until the early 1960s, when a biologist stumbled upon some fascinating life forms that boasted their ability to survive and thrive in extreme conditions. What would be lethal to most of the other organisms is a life-sustaining environment for these creatures, nicknamed “extremophiles,” a word that translates to “extreme lover,” per National Geographic. In a study, documented in Environmental Entomology and Annals of the Entomological Society of America, a group of scientists investigated a type of bug lurking in Yellowstone National Park, whose bizarre design pattern is used to perform its daily functions.
Creatures of the extremes
These are the creatures of the “extremes.” Nothing is too hot or too cold for them. Their very biology is tuned to survive in these intense conditions. And Yellowstone, a gigantic body punctuated with little worlds of extreme, unknowingly cradles zillions of these tiny extreme-loving creatures, mainly as bugs. In 2006, a team of bug scientists or entomologists, led by Leon Higley and Robert Peterson, visited Yellowstone to investigate the mystery of these extremophiles.
Little but powerful bugs
This was probably the first time someone stopped by to say hello to these bugs. They fixated their attention on the tiny bugs to observe how they spent their day and what tasks they performed, in slow motion: be still, move, mate, feed, engage in cooling or warming behaviors. One bug, named wetsalts tiger beetles, left them wonderstruck as they noticed how it survived the scorching hot acidic pools of Yellowstone. “They shouldn’t have been there,” Higley recalled in a press release, “It was too hot.”
Mysterious 'heat shield'
Wetsalts tiger beetles have existed since the Pinedale Glacial Icecap, around 14,000 years ago, when Yellowstone was enshrouded in a thick blanket of ice. Today, a mysterious “heat shield” protects their bodies from infrared radiation, offering them resistance to internal heating, in contrast to other beetles in Yellowstone. These notoriously lilliputian bugs bask around Yellowstone’s steaming hot pools, with their metallic colors glittering in daylight.
The adults, according to the Florida Museum, are so vigorous that when they move, they have to follow a run-stop-run pattern. They move so quickly that they almost turn blind and need to stop at intervals to reorient their vision. A toxic chemical they release makes them smell like bubblegum. Their immatures, or larvae, are sit-and-wait predators. These little guys hang around on the shores and wait for animals like shore bugs, small spiders, soldier flies, and brine flies to show up at the entrance of their burrow. Once the prey shows up, they pounce upon the prey and devour the meal.
A groovy pattern
All these features make it look like the little metallic beetle encapsulates the whole universe within its biology. But beyond that, what Higley and his fellows discovered hit as an unassuming surprise, a “world’s first” discovery that they had to get patented. The patent was for an unusual “groove pattern” that allows these beetles to engage in warming and cooling behaviors. The team discovered that the bug develops a “wax coating” on its body to ward off the hot, acidic conditions of these features.
As part of its water retention mechanism, the bug had a surreal “groove pattern” in its waxy coating with grooves measuring around 10 nanometers in depth. The unique design, together with the whole body mechanism of these tiger beetles, could prove to be a remarkable metaphor for understanding whether life could thrive on Earth’s sister planets, like Mars, Neptune, Saturn, and Jupiter, as TED-Ed reflects. And if yes, then how?
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