Physiological Adaptations Of Insects Exposed To Different Stress Conditions

Physiological Adaptations of Insects Exposed to Different Stress Conditions

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Physiological Adaptations of Insects Exposed to Different Stress Conditions, volume II

Insects are widely distributed in the world, and are highly successful in adapting to a variety of extreme environmental conditions. Such adaptations can be of structural, physiological and behavioral nature. Structural adaptations are for example specific features of the integument, and behavioral adaptations can be avoiding the most severe conditions by retreating into crevices and holes. Physiological adaptation, the body’s response to a specific stimulus in order to maintain an equilibrium, however plays a predominant role in different stress conditions and may occur in some or all developmental stages of insects. In addition, with the development of human society, insects not only need to face naturally occurring extreme environments or stress, such as extreme temperature, drought, high level of salt and shortage of food or nutrients, but also polluted environments including for example a high level of heavy metals, pesticides, CO2, and UV light. Understanding environmental variability and the ways in which organisms respond to such variability over short- and long time scales, is of considerable importance to the field of evolutionary physiology. In recent years, more and more researchers have been concerned about how insects adapt to these stress pressures through physiological regulation. However, there is much more to be learned by employing new protocols and techniques, genomics, proteomics, cellular and molecular biology tools to explore many unanswered questions.

The Role of Peptide Hormones in Insect Physiology, Biochemistry, and Molecular Biology Processes