Oxygen for Grasshopper Eggs

What am I looking at?

This is an image of a fluorescently labeled grasshopper ovary. The breathing tubes are red/orange (1), the sheath that covers the developing eggs is green (2), and the cell nuclei are light blue/purple (3).

Biology in the background

Insects and other invertebrates have different mechanisms for supplying their cells with oxygen than mammals do. Vertebrates have lungs that transfer oxygen from the environment to red blood cells that carry the oxygen to the rest of the body via the circulatory system.

But insects like the giant grasshopper don’t have lungs but instead have a network of breathing tubes called tracheae that run throughout their body. These tracheae start at openings in the exoskeleton called spiracles, which allow oxygen into the insect’s body. The network of tracheae also allows carbon dioxide produced by the insect’s metabolism to exit the body. This system of gas exchange is relatively inefficient, and its effectiveness drops as the organism gets larger, imposing an effective limit on the size of insects and other arthropods.

Technique

This image was created using confocal microscopy.