Hello Explorer!

The last week we've had some decent cold fronts across South Africa, leading to 19 cold records being broken in a 24 hour period between 22 and 23 July. The cold spell has led to the question: How does insects and other invertebrates survive the cold without freezing to death?

The answer is more complicated than one might think initially. Although many insects and invertebrates overwinter in an egg or pupal stage there are many that find other ways to survive the cold.

Insects are cold-blooded, also known as ectothermic. Ectotherm means the regulation of their body temperature through the environment (Ecto- - Outside or outer; -therm - temperature). Furthermore, we know that insects are not homeothermic, meaning they do not maintain a constant body temperature.

Being ectothermic, insects require places with constant temperature, such as under ground or in a leaf litter layer, to avoid the worst of the cold. Another viable tactic is to live in a place that quickly heats up with the sunlight to gain heat during the daytime. Although both these tactics are widely observed in the insect kingdom and they do work to survive, it doesn't allow insects to thrive during winter.

To thrive, insects require higher temperature to maintain a body temperature that will allow them to continue with life as normal. For insects that undergo larval development during winter this is crucial.

Last week I went digging through the compost heap and to my surprise there is a lot of thriving insect life despite the cold. The reason that the insect life is busy thriving in the compost heap is decomposition. The decomposition generates heat and the insects that are thriving in the compost heap do not only benefit from the heat, but also from the abundance of resources.

I spotted three ant colonies with eggs, brood and pupae, and usually in winter they do not have a lot of eggs and brood, but in the compost heap they had a lot! The rhino beetle larvae that I also found are massive and they are just about ready to pupate, which will mean that they will emerge in late spring as adult beetles!

The question that I am yet to investigate now is whether or not the same phenomenon occurs in thick natural leaf litter layers in forests. I will share with you what my findings are when I manage to find a patch of forest that I can explore.

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