Step aside, Simone Biles. Nature's gold medalist for backflips is a millimeter-tall arthropod that can barely straddle the tip of a pencil. Despite its diminutive size, the globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta) can catapult itself 60 mm into the air, spinning at a rate as fast as 368 times per second, researchers report on August 29 in Integrative Organismal Biology.
Blink and you'll miss this super-flipper, though, as its jump lasts just 161 milliseconds, on average. "Nothing on Earth does a backflip faster than a globular springtail," says biologist Adrian Smith of North Carolina State University in Raleigh. "They're extraordinary, but also ordinary." The arthropods that Smith used in the study "are literally from my backyard," he says.
Globular springtails jump so fast that they often seem to simply vanish, a useful trick for evading predators. To uncover the secrets of the arthropods' escape acrobatics, Smith and biomechanist Jacob Harrison of Georgia Tech in Atlanta analyzed high-speed footage of more than a dozen springtails from liftoff to landing.
Liftoff begins with a thump, as the springtail releases a springlike appendage called the furca from its underbelly. That thump propels the arthropods backward at speeds up to 1.5 meters per second, on average, the researchers found. While airborne, the globs spin between 14 to 29 times.
Some flights end less than gracefully, with springtails crashing back to Earth and bouncing about until they come to a stop. More often, the arthropods stick the landing by deploying a sticky tube typically used for grooming, the team discovered. "It's a sort of anchor that pulls them to their feet so they can get on with their day," Smith says.
"We sometimes get told that the only exciting parts of nature are fossilized in the ground or hidden in a tropical rainforest somewhere," Smith says. To him, these springtails demonstrate that everyday organisms are performing incredible feats all around us; we just need to look.
