not curriculum related but.....

[happycc]

My daughter stumped me on a few questions and my scientific mind I guess is not all that scientific......

 

 

Question 1: If you looked at a cell under a microscope and poked a needle in it, would it die?

 

Question 2: What would happen if dirt got into a spiracle of an insect?

[Tigger]

My daughter stumped me on a few questions and my scientific mind I guess is not all that scientific......

 

 

Question 1: If you looked at a cell under a microscope and poked a needle in it, would it die?

 

It would depend on the size of the needle.

 

With a too large needle, the cell would rupture, causing to to collapse as its structure and integrity is breached.

 

However, if one were to have a micro-sized needle, one used under a microscope it's so thin, one can indeed enter a cell with it, then remove it and the cell integrity remains despite the breach (we see this with IVF where the embryologist inserts sperm with a needle into the ovum).

 

Question 2: What would happen if dirt got into a spiracle of an insect?

 

Insects have a pair, so two that function, a system redundancy if you will, like our lungs. If one (next to impossible BTW) were to have dirt enter it, it would be akin to us losing function of or losing fully a lung - we could still live and breath, just with one lung instead of two. If it did happen, my understanding is that in time, the spiracle would clear, to allow full functionality again of both.

[happycc]

Now why doesn't dirt get into the spiracles since insects often crawl and immerse themselves in dirt?

What allows them not to get clogged?

She wants to know exactly how they work as lungs. For example, when we are submerged into water and we breath in the water we can die with fluid in the lungs however does this happen with insects too?

Carolyn

[Tigger]

Now why doesn't dirt get into the spiracles since insects often crawl and immerse themselves in dirt?

What allows them not to get clogged?

She wants to know exactly how they work as lungs. For example, when we are submerged into water and we breath in the water we can die with fluid in the lungs however does this happen with insects too?

Carolyn

 

Well, they don't work as lungs - the example I gave said they were akin to lungs, but they're not lungs. Insects "breathing" isn't really accurate, so let's go to what they do do - that is, they have a respiratory system designed to exchange gases throughout their body.

 

That's accomplished by simple diffusion through the cell walls; basically air enters the spiracles, and moves through the tracheal system, while at the same time carbon dioxide exits.

 

The tracheal tube ends with a moist tracheole (a specialized cell for exchanging gases with another cell in the body); there oxygen dissolves into that tracheole liquid (imagine how small all of this is if O is dissolving). The, through simple diffusion, oxygen moves to the living cell and carbon dioxide enters the tracheal tube to exit the body through the spiracles.

 

So there are two things that protect the spiricles, one is the size, they're teeny - dirt, sand, grit, etc. is larger; and tt's a two-way process O in, CO out and is not like our breathing where we breath in, then out, but is a process of diffusion across cells of both, simultaneously.

 

Does that help?

 

Insects also have control over opening and closing the valves of their spiracles at will.

[Tigger]

This has a better way of explaining than I am - Insect Respiration

[happycc]

Thank you!