Move over, Sonic. There’s a new spin-jumping champion in town.
It’s a bug you’ve probably never heard of before, but it’s a pretty good bet that there are globular springtails right in your backyard.
That’s where 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, recruited the bugs for his study – in fallen leaves behind his house.
"Globular springtails are as close as we can get to Sonic the Hedgehog jump in real life," he explained.
And Smith’s research features the first in-depth look at that jumping prowess.
"So, they have a spring-loaded appendage they keep folded underneath their bodies that they can flip down and smack against the soil and then fling themselves up and into the air. And the globular ones, when they do that they only jump backward and when they fling themselves up, they're rapidly backflipping," Smith said, "So, they can reach rotational rates up to 368 flips per second, which is amongst the fastest back-flipping organisms on Earth.”
Finding the globular springtails was easy enough – they’re all around us. The ones in this study are usually out from December through March. But then came the challenge – documenting their movements for the study. Smith said they jump so fast that you can’t see it in real-time – but he solved that problem by using cameras that shoot 40,000 frames per second.
The bugs are tiny, usually only a couple of millimeters long. They don’t fly, bite or sting. But they can jump. In fact, jumping is their go-to (and only) plan for avoiding predators.
"Some other springtails, they jump, but they can jump forward and they can actually use it for just general locomotion to get around," Smith said. "But these ones seem to be incapable of jumping directly forward and only sort of spring backward. So, we think it's not really a controlled directional thing, it's more like 'let me just spring away from any danger.'”
Sometimes the bugs used a sticky forked tube they can push out of their bodies to grab a surface or stop their momentum, but Smith said bouncing and tumbling to a stop was just as common.
He said the study is a great example of the number of incredible and largely undescribed, organisms living all around us.
"There are things you can find in your backyard that haven't been studied and things that are really extraordinary, things that are doing something better than anything else on Earth and that are simply like mind-blowing when you sort of look at them for what they are.”
And the research also highlights the impact that human action can have on creatures we don’t even realize are living right beneath our feet.
"That really comes down to the decisions we make every day. Like, are we bug-bombing our entire backyard or are we just treating ourselves when we go out in high mosquito season? Right? Right. There is a choice between do you do something that affects the entire ecosystem or do you do something at a more sort of limited level and put mosquito repellent on your own body, if you need to?”
The work appeared this month in the journal Integrative Organismal Biology.
