Scientists have found a type of insect that can do a backflip in the air, spinning more than 60 times its body height in the blink of an eye . With this, they discovered that globular springtails can give the faster mortal than any other known animal on Earth .
“It takes just a millisecond for an arthropod to do a backflip from the ground, and they can reach a maximum rate of 368 rotations per second,” said Adrian Smith, a professor of biology at North Carolina State University and head of the evolutionary biology and behavior research laboratory at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
“When globular springtails jump, they don’t just jump up and down, they do acrobatics in the air — it’s the closest you can get to a springboard jump.” [personagem] Sonic in real life,” said the researcher.
Since they are easy to find between December and March, the professor collected them by sifting through plant debris in his backyard. To make them jump, he shined a light on them or poked them lightly with a paintbrush to observe how they took off, how fast and far they went, and how they landed.
“If you try to film the jump with a normal camera, the springtail will appear for one frame and then disappear. When you look at the photo closely, you can see curvy vapor trails left behind where it rotated during a single frame,” commented Adrian Smith.
To jump, insects use an appendage called a furcula that opens downward and the forked tip pushes against the ground, launching them into a series of backflips.
Observing the fact that they do not leap forward, it has been indicated that this behavior is used as a means of escaping danger rather than a form of locomotion.
The study “Jumping performance and behavior of the globular springtail Dicyrtomina minuta” was published in the journal Integrative Organismal Biology last Thursday (29).
“This is the first time anyone has done a complete description of the jumping performance measurements of the globular springtail, and what they do is almost impossibly spectacular,” Smith concluded. “This is a great example of how we can find amazing and largely undescribed organisms living all around us.”
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This content was originally published in Insect species performs the fastest somersault on the planet; see on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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