{"id":102644,"date":"2024-08-29T09:04:13","date_gmt":"2024-08-29T13:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/?post_type=news&p=102644"},"modified":"2024-08-29T09:04:13","modified_gmt":"2024-08-29T13:04:13","slug":"this-tiny-backyard-bug-does-the-fastest-backflips-on-earth","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/news\/this-tiny-backyard-bug-does-the-fastest-backflips-on-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"This Tiny Backyard Bug Does the Fastest Backflips on Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"CompositeComposite image of a globular springtail jumping.<\/span><\/p>\n

By Tracey Peake, NCSU News Services<\/em><\/p>\n

Move over, Sonic. There\u2019s a new spin-jumping champion in town \u2013 the globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta<\/em>). This diminutive hexapod backflips into the air, spinning to over 60 times its body height in the blink of an eye, and a new study features the first in-depth look at its jumping prowess.<\/p>\n

Globular springtails are tiny, usually only a couple millimeters in body length. They don\u2019t fly, bite or sting. But they can jump. In fact, jumping is their go-to (and only) plan for avoiding predators. And they excel at it \u2013 to the naked eye it seems as though they vanish entirely when they take off.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen globular springtails jump, they don\u2019t just leap up and down, they flip through the air \u2013 it\u2019s the closest you can get to a Sonic the Hedgehog jump in real life,\u201d says Adrian Smith, research assistant professor of biology at North Carolina State University and head of the evolutionary biology and behavior research lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. \u201cSo naturally I wanted to see how they do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finding the globular springtails was easy enough \u2013 they\u2019re all around us. The ones in this study are usually out from December through March. Smith \u201crecruited\u201d his research subjects by sifting through leaf litter from his own backyard. But the next part proved to be the most challenging.<\/p>\n

\u201cGlobular springtails jump so fast that you can\u2019t see it in real time,\u201d Smith says. \u201cIf you try to film the jump with a regular camera, the springtail will appear in one frame, then vanish. When you look at the picture closely, you can see faint vapor trail curlicues left behind where it flipped through the one frame.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smith solved that problem by using cameras that shoot 40,000 frames per second. He urged the springtails to jump by shining a light on them or lightly prodding them with an artist\u2019s paintbrush. Then he looked at how they took off, how fast and far they went, and how they landed. A video explanation of this research can be found here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Globular springtails don\u2019t use their legs to jump. Instead, they have an appendage called a furca that folds up underneath their abdomen and has a tiny, forked structure at its tip. When the springtails jump, the furca flips down and the forked tip pushes against the ground, launching them into a series of insanely fast backflips.<\/p>\n

What do we mean by insanely fast?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt only takes a globular springtail one thousandth of a second to backflip off the ground and they can reach a peak rate of 368 rotations per second,\u201d Smith says. \u201cThey accelerate their bodies into a jump at about the same rate as a flea, but on top of that they spin. No other animal on earth does a backflip faster than a globular springtail.\u201d<\/p>\n

The springtails were also able to launch themselves over 60 millimeters into the air \u2013 more than 60 times their own height. And in most cases, they went backward.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey can lean into a jump and go slightly sideways, but when launching from a flat surface, they mostly travel up and backward, never forward,\u201d says Jacob Harrison, a postdoctoral researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and paper co-author. \u201cTheir inability to jump forward was an indication to us that jumping is primarily a means to escape danger, rather than a form of general locomotion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Landing was found in two styles: uncontrolled and anchored. Globular springtails do have a sticky forked tube they can evert \u2013 or push out of their bodies \u2013 to grapple a surface or halt their momentum, but Smith observed that bouncing and tumbling to a stop was just as common as anchored landings.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the first time anyone has done a complete description of the globular springtail\u2019s jumping performance measures, and what they do is almost impossibly spectacular,\u201d Smith says. \u201cThis is a great example of how we can find incredible, and largely undescribed, organisms living all around us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The work appears in Integrative Organismal Biology<\/em>. Smith is the corresponding author.<\/p>\n

\n

Note to editors<\/strong>: An abstract follows.<\/p>\n

\u201cJumping performance and behavior of the globular springtail Dicyrtomina minuta<\/em>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

DOI: <\/strong>10.1093\/iob\/obae029<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Authors:<\/strong> Adrian Smith, North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences; Jacob Harrison, Georgia Institute of Technology<\/p>\n

Published:<\/strong> Aug. 29, 2024 in Integrative Organismal Biology<\/em><\/p>\n

Abstract:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Springtails are among the most abundant arthropods on Earth and they exhibit unique latch-mediated spring-actuated jumping behaviors and anatomical systems. Despite this, springtail jumps have not been well described, especially for those with a globular body plan. Here, we provide a complete description and visualization of jumping in the globular springtail Dicyrtomina minuta<\/em>. A furca-powered jump results in an average take-off velocity of 1 ms-1 <\/sup>in 1.7 ms, with a fastest acceleration to liftoff of 1,938 ms-2<\/sup>. All jumps involve rapid backwards body rotation throughout, rotating on average at 282.2 Hz with a peak rate of 368.7 Hz. Despite body lengths of 1-2 mm, jumping resulted in a backwards trajectory traveling up to 102 mm in horizontal distance and 62 mm in vertical. Escape jumps in response to posterior stimulation did not elicit forward-facing jumps, suggesting that D. minuta<\/em> is incapable of directing a jump off a flat surface within the 90\u00b0 heading directly in front of them. Finally, two landing strategies were observed: collophore-anchoring which allows for an immediate arrest and recovery, and uncontrolled landings where the springtail chaotically tumbles. In comparison to other fast jumping arthropods, linear performance measures globular springtail jumps place them between other systems like fleas and froghoppers. However, in angular body rotation, globular springtails like D. minuta<\/em> surpass all other animal systems. Given the extraordinary performance measures, unique behavioral responses, and understudied nature of these species, globular springtails present promising opportunities for further description and comparison.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102651,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/102644"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/102644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}