Rhodnius prolixus — also known as the kissing bug because it often feeds around the mouths of its hosts. Image: Dr. Erwin Huebner, University of Manitoba (CC0 Public Domain)

Keeping cool during a hot meal

Kissing bugs have a heat exchanger in their heads that prevents them from overheating as they ingest blood.

Many insect species have adopted the blood of birds and mammals as their main or even only food. Yet, blood is not freely available in nature, but it circulates inside vessels hidden under the skin of animals much bigger than the insect and capable of defending themselves from getting bitten. To succeed in getting a meal, blood-sucking insects must be able to feed quickly and take in as much blood as possible. Each time that they do this, a huge amount of warm fluid enters their body in just a few minutes. The blood temperature can be up to 20° or 25°C warmer than the insect itself. Moreover, an insect called a kissing bug may ingest up to 10 times its own weight in only fifteen minutes. The consequence is overheating and potentially harmful thermal stress.

Kissing bugs do not seem to suffer any harmful consequence of taking massive meals from warm-blooded animals. But why? The answer was unexpected: they simply do not warm up when they take a blood meal. However, it was not known how they manage to cool down the ingested blood.

By combining classical methods of studying anatomy with state of the art technologies, Lahondère et al. discovered that kissing bugs possess a sophisticated heat exchanger inside their heads. It works by transferring the heat associated with the ingested blood to the haemolymph (insect blood); these fluids circulate in opposite directions inside ducts that are close to each other in the head.

The discovery of a new system used by insects to cope with thermal stress expands our knowledge of insect physiology and opens new lines of research. The kissing bug heat exchanger could also serve as inspiration for equivalent technological systems. Last but not least, kissing bugs spread the parasites that cause Chagas disease in the Americas. Finding ways to disrupt the heat exchanger could prevent kissing bugs from feeding on blood, and so help to control the spread of disease.

To find out more

Read the eLife research paper on which this eLife digest is based:

Countercurrent heat exchange and thermoregulation during blood-feeding in kissing bugs

eLife is an open-access journal that publishes outstanding research in the life sciences and biomedicine.

This text was reused under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.