Midlatitude daytime D region ionosphere variations measured from radio atmospherics

We measured the midlatitude daytime ionospheric D region electron density profile height variations in July and August 2005 near Duke University by using radio atmospherics (or sferics for short), which are the high-power, broadband very low frequency (VLF) signals launched by lightning discharges. As expected, the measured daytime D region electron density profile heights showed temporal variations quantitatively correlated with solar zenith angle changes. In the midlatitude geographical regions near Duke University, the observed quiet time heights decreased from ∼80 km near sunrise to ∼71 km near noon when the solar zenith angle was minimum. The measured height quantitative dependence on the solar zenith angle was slightly different from the low-latitude measurement given in a previous work. We also observed unexpected spatial variations not linked to the solar zenith angle on some days, with 15% of days exhibiting regional differences larger than 0.5 km. In these 2 months, 14 days had sudden height drops caused by solar flare X-rays, with a minimum height of 63.4 km observed. The induced height change during a solar flare event was approximately proportional to the logarithm of the X-ray flux. In the long waveband (wavelength, 1-8 Å), an increase in flux by a factor of 10 resulted in 6.3 km decrease of the height at the flux peak time, nearly a perfect agreement with the previous measurement. During the rising and decaying phases of the solar flare, the height changes correlated more consistently with the short, rather than the long, wavelength X-ray flux changes. © 2010 by the American Geophysical Union.

A switch in the control of growth of the wing imaginal disks of Manduca sexta.

BACKGROUND: Insulin and ecdysone are the key extrinsic regulators of growth for the wing imaginal disks of insects. In vitro tissue culture studies have shown that these two growth regulators act synergistically: either factor alone stimulates only limited growth, but together they stimulate disks to grow at a rate identical to that observed in situ. It is generally thought that insulin signaling links growth to nutrition, and that starvation stops growth because it inhibits insulin secretion. At the end of larval life feeding stops but the disks continue to grow, so at that time disk growth has become uncoupled from nutrition. We sought to determine at exactly what point in development this uncoupling occurs. METHODOLOGY: Growth and cell proliferation in the wing imaginal disks and hemolymph carbohydrate concentrations were measured at various stages in the last larval instar under experimental conditions of starvation, ligation, rescue, and hormone treatment. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Here we show that in the last larval instar of M. sexta, the uncoupling of nutrition and growth occurs as the larva passes the critical weight. Before this time, starvation causes a decline in hemolymph glucose and trehalose and a cessation of wing imaginal disks growth, which can be rescued by injections of trehalose. After the critical weight the trehalose response to starvation disappears, and the expression of insulin becomes decoupled from nutrition. After the critical weight the wing disks loose their sensitivity to repression by juvenile hormone, and factors from the abdomen, but not the brain, are required to drive continued growth. CONCLUSIONS: During the last larval instar imaginal disk growth becomes decoupled from somatic growth at the time that the endocrine events of metamorphosis are initiated. These regulatory changes ensure that disk growth continues uninterrupted when the nutritive and endocrine signals undergo the drastic changes associated with metamorphosis.

A Quantitative Analysis of Growth and Size Regulation in Manduca sexta: The Physiological Basis of Variation in Size and Age at Metamorphosis.

Body size and development time are important life history traits because they are often highly correlated with fitness. Although the developmental mechanisms that control growth have been well studied, the mechanisms that control how a species-characteristic body size is achieved remain poorly understood. In insects adult body size is determined by the number of larval molts, the size increment at each molt, and the mechanism that determines during which instar larval growth will stop. Adult insects do not grow, so the size at which a larva stops growing determines adult body size. Here we develop a quantitative understanding of the kinetics of growth throughout larval life of Manduca sexta, under different conditions of nutrition and temperature, and for genetic strains with different adult body sizes. We show that the generally accepted view that the size increment at each molt is constant (Dyar's Rule) is systematically violated: there is actually a progressive increase in the size increment from instar to instar that is independent of temperature. In addition, the mass-specific growth rate declines throughout the growth phase in a temperature-dependent manner. We show that growth within an instar follows a truncated Gompertz trajectory. The critical weight, which determines when in an instar a molt will occur, and the threshold size, which determines which instar is the last, are different in genetic strains with different adult body sizes. Under nutrient and temperature stress Manduca has a variable number of larval instars and we show that this is due to the fact that more molts at smaller increments are taken before threshold size is reached. We test whether the new insight into the kinetics of growth and size determination are sufficient to explain body size and development time through a mathematical model that incorporates our quantitative findings.