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Bumblebees Can Breathe Underwater?!

Most people assume bees are creatures of the air, zipping between flowers on warm sunny days, but scientists just discovered something that completely turns that picture on its head. Bumblebee queens, it turns out, can actually breathe underwater, and the whole finding began with a lab accident that nobody saw coming. A conservation biologist studying the effects of pesticides on hibernating bumblebees opened her lab fridge one day to find that condensation had flooded several of her test tubes, completely submerging the queens resting inside. She assumed they were all dead, and then watched in total disbelief as they started moving the moment she removed them from the water.

That accidental discovery launched a full scientific investigation, and the results now published in a major research journal have left experts genuinely astonished. Like most bees, queen bumblebees spend the winter hibernating underground, waiting out the cold months so they can emerge and start new colonies when spring arrives. During that time, melting snow and heavy rains can saturate the soil and bury them in water for days at a stretch, and scientists now know they have developed two remarkable survival tricks for exactly that situation. The queens slow their body functions down to roughly 5 percent of their normal rate, dramatically reducing how much oxygen they need, and then quietly extract whatever oxygen remains dissolved in the surrounding water, just as aquatic insects do. If the oxygen runs too low, they can also switch to a backup system that fuels their cells without it entirely, then spend the following days breathing hard to flush out the waste products left behind. Researchers say this is the first time any land-based insect has been confirmed to breathe underwater, and they now suspect the ability may turn out to be far more common among bee species than anyone has imagined.

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bumblebee-queens-breathe-underwater-to-survive-drowning-revealing-how-they-can-live-submerged-for-a-week-180988330/

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