In a year already filled with incredible sports achievements, one athlete has now pulled off a truly astonishing feat: the fastest backflip on Earth. So who does the record go to? A tiny bug known as a globular springtail.
In fact, the bug backflips so fast that it looks like they vanish entirely when they take off to the naked eye.
The globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta) is very small at only 1mm tall and is a hexapod, meaning it has six legs. Now, researchers have revealed that it rapidly spins to propel itself to over 60 times its body height – in just the blink of an eye.
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“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,” said corresponding author Adrian Smith, head of the evolutionary biology and behaviour research lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. “So naturally I wanted to see how they do it.”
Globular springtails are all around us – in fact, Smith got his research ‘participants’ in the leaf litter from his own garden.
Published in the journal of Integrative Organismal Biology, Smith’s research is the first in-depth study of the bug’s jumping movement. Even better, he caught it on video.
The fact that you can’t see them take off makes them hard to study. It also means filming them with a regular camera shows the bug appearing in one frame and then vanish. According to Smith, close-up stills of this moment simply show a faint vapour trail left behind.
That’s why he decided to use a camera that shoots 40,000 frames per second. He started by provoking the bugs to jump by shining a light on them or tickling them with a small paintbrush. Then, using the super-fast video footage, he studied how they take off, how fast they go, how far they go, and how they land.
He discovered that they take off with the same acceleration rate as a flea, taking just one-thousandth of a second to backflip off the ground. But then they do something unusual: they spin. Reaching 368 rotations per second, this action is what makes them vanish.
Step aside Simone Biles: “No other animal on earth does a backflip faster than a globular springtail,” said Smith.
Why? This motion, the researchers think, is like putting on a vanishing act to escape predators. This is the globular springtail’s only superpower, given that they don’t fly, bite or sting.
In fact, the discovery that they mostly move backwards – sometimes to one side, but never forwards – supports the researchers’ theory that the move helps to propel the bugs away from danger.
You might think going so fast could make landing tricky. But the researchers observed that they have a kind of ‘anchor’ – a sticky forked tube – that they can push out of their bodies onto a surface to slow them down. That said, Smith observed them tumbling to a stop without using this anchor just as often as their more controlled landings.
“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,” Smith said.
“This is a great example of how we can find incredible, and largely undescribed, organisms living all around us.”
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