Ask Anything: Can Insects Get Fat?

Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - 11:20 in Biology & Nature

Miroslaw Kijewski/Getty Images Some initial work on chubby bugs occurred in the early 1960s, when a Florida entomologist started publishing research on obese mosquitoes. When he fed the wild-caught flies by hand (“by easing the proboscis into a micropipette”), he found that he could turn half their bodies into fat, by dry weight. More recently, scientists have studied obesity in male dragonflies. Ruud Schilder, a biologist at Penn State, showed that infection with a certain parasite will induce the bugs to build up lipids in their thorax and around the muscles that they use for flight. These fatty dragonflies end up less successful at mating and defending their territory from rivals—perhaps because they’re unable to maintain long flights. In uninfected flies, however, it can help to have some fat: One of Schilder’s colleagues found that plump, healthy dragonflies had stronger flight muscles and reproduced more easily. Because...

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