The importance of respiratory patterns and the physical properties of cuticular lipids to insect water balance were investigated in natural populations of the grasshopper Melanoplus sanguinipes. I specifically test the hypotheses that patterns of discontinuous ventilation affect water loss and that increased amounts and melting points of cuticular lipid reduce water loss. Using flow-through res...

Grasshoppers of the species Schistocerca nitens (Thiinberg), Locusta migratoria (L.) and Tmethis pulchripennis (Bolivar) are able to withstand air temperatures higher than lethal internal temperature (48 °C) for more than an hour, during which time they maintain an internal temperature as much as 8°C below air temperature. Rates of evaporation at high air temperatures are much greater than thos...

The goal of this study was to determine the effects of atmospheric demand on both plant water relations and daily whole-tree water balance across the upper limit of a cloud forest at the mean base height of the trade wind inversion in the tropical trade wind belt. We measured the microclimate and water relations (sap flow, water potential, stomatal conductance, pressure-volume relations) of Met...

A goal of modern agriculture is to improve plant drought tolerance and production per amount of water used, referred to as water use efficiency (WUE). Although stomatal density has been linked to WUE, the causal molecular mechanisms have yet to be determined. Arabidopsis thaliana GT-2 LIKE 1 (GTL1) loss-of-function mutations result in increased water deficit tolerance and higher integrated WUE ...

Many researchers are using sap flux to estimate tree-level transpiration, and to scale to standand catchment-level transpiration; yet studies evaluating the comparability of sap flux-based estimates of transpiration (Et) with alternative methods for estimating Et at this spatial scale are rare. Our ability to accurately scale from the probe to the tree to the watershed has not yet been demonstr...