Advertisement

Drudge Retort: The Other Side of the News
Tuesday, September 03, 2024

Move over, Sonic. There's a new spin-jumping champion in town -- the globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta). 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.

More

Comments

Admin's note: Participants in this discussion must follow the site's moderation policy. Profanity will be filtered. Abusive conduct is not allowed.

More from the article...

... Globular springtails are tiny, usually only a couple millimeters in body length. They don't 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 -- to the naked eye it seems as though they vanish entirely when they take off.

"When globular springtails jump, they don't just leap up and down, they flip through the air -- it's the closest you can get to a Sonic the Hedgehog jump in real life," 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. "So naturally I wanted to see how they do it."

Finding the globular springtails was easy enough -- they're all around us. ...

What do we mean by insanely fast?

"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," Smith says. "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." ...


#1 | Posted by LampLighter at 2024-09-03 12:37 AM | Reply

There's a video...

Springtails do the fastest backflip on earth! (6 minutes)
www.youtube.com

#2 | Posted by LampLighter at 2024-09-03 12:39 AM | Reply

holy cr@p...that is a lot of backflips...

#3 | Posted by earthmuse at 2024-09-03 01:04 PM | Reply

Comments are closed for this entry.

Home | Breaking News | Comments | User Blogs | Stats | Back Page | RSS Feed | RSS Spec | DMCA Compliance | Privacy | Copyright 2024 World Readable

Drudge Retort