https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-024-01089-3
Regular Article
Schrödinger’s cat among insects: non-invasive Raman spectroscopy to determine live and dead insects in diapause
1
Department of Animal Morphology and Ecology, Faculty of Biology, N.G. Chernyshevsky Saratov State University, Saratov, Russia
2
Department of Biophysics, Faculty of Biology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia
3
Education and Research Institute of Nanostructures and Biosystems, N.G. Chernyshevsky Saratov State University, Saratov, Russia
Received:
3
November
2023
Accepted:
4
January
2024
Published online:
31
January
2024
Diapause is a peculiar sleep of insects in which the animal's motor activity completely ceases. During this period, insects become a good target for parasitoids, freely attacking them with their mobile ovipositors. We found that the parasitic wasp, Eupelmus messene (Hymenoptera, Eupelmidae, Cynipidae), stirs the internal contents of the diapausing host pupa of Aulacidea hieracii (Bouché, 1834) with its long and flexible ovipositor “making a shake” inside the pupa. However, the attacked pupae stay morphologically indistinguishable from healthy diapausing ones for several months. Using non-invasive Raman spectroscopy (RS), we, for the first time, studied the molecular composition of live diapausing and parasitized A. hieracii pupae. As a result of the study, we discovered alterations in the content and distribution of carotenoids, lipids, and proteins in the attacked pupae compared to the live intact diapausing pupae.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2024. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
