Back in my teenaged amateur-entomologist days, I would use the freezer as a way of putting dangerous bugs to hypothermic sleep (captured hornets or wasps, for instance). Didn’t matter how aggressive the bug was; just put him in the freezer and he’ll be immobile within minutes. At which point one can then take out the bug and observe him in his motionless state.
Do real scientists/entomologists ever do something like this when dealing with live bugs, or was this just my own ad-hoc method?
Just curious: Are you using “motionless” as a euphemism for “dead”, or did they wake up after thawing out?
Hornets would wake up and start moving again after a few minutes, yes, when they warmed up again at room temperature. Can’t recall if this was the same for other bugs and spiders.
That’s an old trick to take pictures of insects. Cool them off, so they go into torpor, take them out and pose them where you want them, then take their picture before they warm up and fly away.
Cool
I spent a summer visiting six areas to capture grasshoppers that were becoming a plague.
I would ship them to the university in foam boxes with refreezable ice. The university would identify and measure them. I don’t know if the ice killed them, but they would be in better shape than if the were exposed to the summer heat.
It’s perfectly normal for a kid to catch a housefly and put it to sleep in the freezer so said kid can drop it into a creepy spider web by the basement stairs. As the fly awakens, it starts to move and tries to escape which alerts the spider to do its thing. Perfectly normal.
That used to be kind of a magic trick. Put a fly in the freezer until it stops moving.
Stage the fly on a table or something. Then in front of your friends you “find” the “dead” fly. Put it in the palm of your hand until it warms up and flies away.
It was also a great way to make a pet fly. When he stops moving, put the fly on his back, apply a drop of crazy glue to his belly, and stick the end of a string to fly. When the fly thaws, you have a fly on a leash.
“Stay the blazes home” - Stephen McNeil, Premier of Nova Scotia
I am a Real Entomologist ™ and yes, I use the freezer (or ice) to immobilize insects all the time. For experiments where I need the critters to stay still for a long time I use a chill table (a Peltier device that keeps a surface cold). Freezer is also how we kill off cages of insects (overnight at least, you’d be surprised at what some of these little buggers can withstand and recover from).
You want a movie of a butterfly flying up and landing in someone’s hand? Catch butterfly, put in fridge. When it’s motionless, take it out. Put it in the palm of your actor’s hand. Wait a couple of minutes as it revives and flies away. Run this section of film in reverse and voila, you’ve got a movie of someone who can attract butterflies.
I used to use the freezer to immobilize Drosophila in the genetics lab, These fruit flies are a staple of genetics research. They’d come to once they warmed up.
So they hold genetics research papers together?
I can report that real biomedical researchers sometimes have drifts of dead ants in the bottom of their freezer. The little fellers get into everything, and freezers are a thing they don’t get out of again.