- The following is from Aquatic Insects in Alaska by John Hudson, Katherine Hocker and Robert H. Armstrong
- One of the biggest dangers to living tissue is ice.
- Freezing binds up water that is essential to life, and sharp ice crystals pierce cell walls, damaging or destroying them.
- But many aquatic insect larvae such as caddisflies in Alaska can survive being frozen into ice.
- When the ice melts, the insect comes “back to life.”
- How do they do it?
- They build up high concentrations of sugars or sugar alcohols that serve as antifreeze within their cells. Ice may form in the fluid outside the cells, where there is no antifreeze, but there it can’t bulge the cells out or puncture their critical membranes.
