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Our highly seasonal world restricts insect activity to brief portions of the year. This feature necessitates a sophisticated interpretation of seasonal changes and enactment of mechanisms for bringing development to a halt and then reinitiating it when the inimical season is past. The dormant state of diapause serves to bridge the unfavourable seasons, and its timing provides a powerful mechanism for synchronizing insect development. This book explores how seasonal signals are monitored and used by insects to enact specific molecular pathways that generate the diapause phenotype. The broad perspective offered here scales from the ecological to the molecular and thus provides a comprehensive view of this exciting and vibrant research field, offering insights on topics ranging from pest management, evolution, speciation, climate change and disease transmission, to human health, as well as analogies with other forms of invertebrate dormancy and mammalian hibernation.
The study of thermoregulation in endotherms has contributed much to the emergence of the concept of control theory in biology. By the same token, the study of tempera ture adjustment in ectotherms is likely to have a far-reaching influence on ideas on the regulation of metabolism in general. The reason for this is that ectotherms, in adapting to the vagaries of a thermally unstable environment, deploy a range of subtle molecular and organismic strategies. Thus the experimenter, using temperature changes as a tool, is well equipped to analyze some of these strategies. This approach has enabled some important mechanisms of temperature-induced adaptation to be elucidated; the most striking of these are the effects on metabolism of changes in the conformation of enzymes and the transfer properties of membranes. Furthermore, there is a vague but persistent feeling among those working in this field that changes in the nervous system will ultimately prove to be the agency by which many of the molecular mechanisms of temperature adaptation are controlled. Should this indeed be the case, a new phase would soon begin in our understanding of the interactions between the systemic and the cellular levels of organization. However, it is not only questions about the causes of temperature adaptation that can provide answers of potential importance to the general biologist; of equal significance are questions as to the meaning of temperature adaptation in a particular organism.
The study of insects at low temperature is a comparatively new field. Only recently has insect cryobiology begun to mature, as research moves from a descriptive approach to a search for underlying mechanisms at diverse levels of organization ranging from the gene and cell to ecological and evolutionary relationships. Knowledge of insect responses to low temperature is crucial for understanding the biology of insects living in seasonally varying habitats as well as in polar regions. It is not possible to precisely define low temperature. In the tropics exposure to 10-15°C may induce chill coma or death, whereas some insects in temperate and polar regions remain active and indeed even able to fly at O°C or below. In contrast, for persons interested in cryopreservation, low temperature may mean storage in liquid nitrogen at - 196°C. In the last decade, interest in adaptations of invertebrates to low temperature has risen steadily. In part, this book had its origins in a symposium on this subject that was held at the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America in Louisville, Kentucky, USA in December, 1988. However, the emergence and growth of this area has also been strongly influenced by an informal group of investigators who met in a series of symposia held in Oslo, Norway in 1982, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada in 1985 and in Cambridge, England in 1988. Another is scheduled for Binghamton, New York, USA (1990).
This new volume of Current Topics in Developmental Biology covers developmental timing, with contributions from an international board of authors. The chapters provide a comprehensive set of reviews covering such topics as the timing of developmental programs in Drosophila, temporal patterning of neural progenitors, and environmental modulation of developmental timing.