Living in ice: Examining the effects of temperature on thermal and metabolic physiology of glacier ice worms ( <i>Mesenchytraeus solifugus</i> )
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Animals employ many strategies to survive in extreme cold. Glacier ice worms (Mesenchytraeus solifugus) are the largest animals that spend their entire life cycle in ice. Indeed, they spend most of their lives near 0°C and accumulate adenosine trisphosphate (ATP) to mitigate the impacts of cold on their performance. However, the degree to which ice worms can survive temperatures above and below freezing has not been thoroughly investigated. Furthermore, the role of cold temperatures in shaping whole-body metabolism in ice worms is largely unknown. Here, we assessed thermal limits of ice worms as well as their whole-body metabolic rates. Notably, we found that though ice worms can survive short-term exposures to surprisingly warm temperatures (~26°C), they cannot tolerate freezing, including internal ice formation. Ice worm metabolic rates also significantly increased with temperature up to 16°C where a significant break point occurred. Taken together, our results further illuminate how ice worms survive their unique life in ice and highlight how close they live to their lower thermal limits. Looking ahead, we note the clear risks that anthropogenic climate change, glacier recession, and loss of mountain snowpack pose to the future of ice worms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".