Eli5: Where do insects go when temperatures drop below -25C in the winter and isn’t the soil frozen for them to go under?
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Obviously this will vary by species. But generally:
Soil doesn’t freeze very deep down. Many insects will burrow down deeper into the soil.
Many will also find protected spaces like crawl spaces under houses or fallen trees and stumps that offer some slight insulation from the cold.
Many insects can also tolerate very low temperatures. They don’t have nearly as much water by weight as other animals so there’s less risk of cell damage from frozen water. So when there’s a hard freeze, they aren’t necessarily injured as we or other vertebrates would.
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