The strange snow bug Alaska is spending $750K to understand

There's a strange little insect that lives on Alaska's snow, walks on it in the dead of winter, can't fly, and is so rarely seen that scientists still don't know how many kinds exist. Now a Fairbanks researcher has nearly $750,000 to find out.

The National Science Foundation grant will fund a three-year effort to sequence the genomes of nearly every known species of snow scorpionfly — a cold-loving, wingless bug that, despite its name, is neither a scorpion nor a fly. They turn up across the northern hemisphere but are so seldom encountered that basic questions about them go unanswered: how many species there are, how they're related, where one kind ends and another begins. Derek Sikes, the insect curator at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, will lead the work, combining fieldwork, museum specimens, and genetics to build the group's first real family tree.

One of the last big unsolved puzzles in insect evolution is how scorpionflies relate to fleas — and snow scorpionflies may be fleas' closest cousins. The genomes from this project could finally settle it. The grant also puts Alaska undergraduates and a postdoc to work on cutting-edge genetics, and funds summer bug camps for kids, with the findings shared freely online.