THE first Earthling to walk on Mars may have six legs. Charlie Cockell of the
British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge and his colleagues have found that insects
can tolerate surprisingly low pressures. 鈥淭hat means they could be brought in at
the early stages of terraforming Mars,鈥� he says. The Martian atmosphere is 200
times less dense than Earth鈥檚.
The researchers put a variety of insects in a vacuum chamber. As the pressure
dropped, the beasties first ran scared and then stopped moving. But at around 20
per cent of atmospheric pressure they resumed normal behaviour. At pressures as
low as a tenth of an atmosphere, milkweed bugs mated and cockroaches laid eggs,
although ant communication was somewhat impaired, perhaps because it affected
messages sent via pheromones.
Dragonfly nymphs were even untroubled by an atmosphere only slightly more
than 1 per cent of normal鈥攕o low that the water they were in was boiling.
鈥淚t was weird,鈥� says Cockell.
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