Despite what you might say when drunk, you’re not the best backflipper in the world. That honor belongs to a tiny little bug called a globular springtail, whose superfast backflips have now been caught on slow-motion camera for the first time.
The globular springtail is a common insect you might find in your backyard – if you’re quick enough. As soon as it senses danger, it’ll backflip its way to safety in as little as 1.7 milliseconds. Those jumps are of course hard to study, since a regular camera will just catch a blur if it’s lucky.
So for the new study, researchers at North Carolina State University filmed springtails jumping with ultrafast cameras that can shoot at up to 40,000 frames per second. The insects were collected from the researchers’ own backyards, then spooked into jumping by shining lights on them or giving them a light poke with a thin paintbrush.
As the name suggests, springtails don’t launch themselves with their legs. They have a unique little appendage called a furca folded up underneath their bellies, which pushes off the ground when it’s time to skedaddle and sends them spinning into the air.
Using this ultrafast camera, the team recorded the speed of the bugs’ backflips, as well as the number of flips they pulled off in midair, the height, distance and direction of the leaps, and how they stuck the landing.
“It 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,” said Adrian Smith, corresponding author of the study. “They 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.”
The maximum height a springtail reached was 62 mm (2.4 in), and they managed to travel up to 102 mm (4 in) from their starting point. That’s pretty impressive for a bug that itself only measures 1 to 2 mm (0.04 to 0.08 in) long. It would be the equivalent of an average human at 1.7m (5 ft 7 in) leaping 70 m (230 ft) straight into the air and landing 116 m (380 ft) away – while pulling off a few hundred sick backflips on the way.
We’ve got to be honest, that sounds like a pretty impressive way to get around. But it turns out the bugs don’t really use it that way – in their experiments the researchers never once saw a springtail leap forwards, only ever backwards and maybe a little to the side.
“They can lean into a jump and go slightly sideways, but when launching from a flat surface, they mostly travel up and backward, never forward,” said Jacob Harrison, co-author of the study. “Their 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.”
After a jump, springtails can use a sticky forked tube to catch onto a surface for a graceful landing. But they only pulled this off about half the time, the team says – the other half, they bounced and tumbled and rolled around randomly.
“This is the first time anyone has done a complete description of the globular springtail’s jumping performance measures, and what they do is almost impossibly spectacular,” said Smith. “This is a great example of how we can find incredible, and largely undescribed, organisms living all around us.”
The research was published in the journal Integrative Organismal Biology. The bugs’ backflips can be seen in action in the video below.
Source: North Carolina State University
