Where do insects go in the winter?

Many times we are asked what happens to insects and rodents in the winter? During the warm months insects are everywhere but once the temperature drops where on earth do they go? This week we address that question with the help of Brent Sinclair the director of the Insect Low Temperature Biology Lab at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, in an article by Lauren Friedman originally posted on www.businessinsider.com

1. Avoid The Cold

The first strategy is perhaps the most straightforward. Many insects survive the cold winters by simply avoiding them, employing what Sinclair dubs “the snowbird approach.”

Some, like butterflies and dragonflies, migrate much like songbirds do, heading south en masse as soon as the cold sets in. (Researchers have actually attached tiny radio transmitters to dragonflies to track these migration patterns.)

North American monarch butterflies, the most famous migrating insects, make a long and somewhat miraculous journey to central Mexico each winter. (Swallowtail butterflies do no such thing, sticking out the winter safely encased as a chrysalis instead.)

For other insects, avoiding sub-zero temperatures means a journey of inches, not miles. Many aquatic insects wait out the winter at the bottoms of ponds, where they can remain relatively comfortable even when the surface freezes, Sinclair explains. Others do the same in the soil, burrowing deep below the frost.

Different types of mosquitoes have different winter survival strategies, but some are able to survive cold temperatures by hiding out in sheltered places like “inside the envelope of a house or under a bridge,” Sinclair says, where they lay in wait in a state called “quiescence.” Their next meal won’t come till springtime.