For the first time ever, researchers have captured the world’s fastest backflipper showing off its talent in slow motion. The insect’s movements are so fast, in fact, that the team needed a camera capable of shooting upwards of 40,000 frames-per-second, according to their study published on August 29 in the journal, Integrative Organismal Biology.
Although measuring less than 2mm in length, a globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta) is technically easy to find in most people’s backyards—provided you don’t spook it. If the common, tiny hexapod feels the need to make a quick getaway, however, it can disappear literally faster than the blink of an eye. This is thanks to its furca, a miniscule forked appendage located on its underside that unfolds to push the bug off the ground. Once the furca is deployed, a springtail can launch over 100 times its body length in under 1.7 milliseconds. Not only that, but it does so while performing a dizzying number of backflips.
“They accelerate their bodies into a jump at about the same rate as a flea, but on top of that they spin,” Adrian Smith, a research assistant professor of biology at North Carolina State University and head of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science’s evolutionary biology and behavior research lab, said in an August 29 university announcement. “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.”
The average rotations were considerably less, at around 20 spins per second. At either rate, however, how did Smith’s team measure such ultrafast, dizzying acrobatics at such a small scale? First, they needed to collect a few springtails, which as New Atlas explained on August 30, involved sifting through Smith’s own leaf litter at his home. But before researchers could attempt to record springtail leaps, they first needed to set up specialized equipment.
“If you try to film the jump with a regular camera, the springtail will appear in one frame, then vanish,” Smith said. “When you look at the picture closely, you can see faint vapor trail curlicues left behind where it flipped through the one frame.”
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To meet these intense requirements, Smith’s team used a high speed camera that snaps images at 40,000 frames-per-second. Once springtails were enticed to lift off through either light exposure or a gentle prod from a soft paintbrush, the camera got to work recording their world record feats of locomotion.
Interestingly, springtails were observed almost exclusively jumping backwards, an indication that the creatures evolved their ability as a means to evade predators instead of forward travel. According to Smith, the team’s work represents the first time biologists have recorded the springtail’s “almost impossibly spectacular” talent.
“This is a great example of how we can find incredible, and largely undescribed, organisms living all around us,” he added.
