This BUG does the fastest backflip on earth!

Ant Lab
Aug 29 2024

I published new research describing how globular springtails jump! This video summarizes some of that work and shows all of the ways we filmed and visualized all the components of their jumps. The globular species we researched is Dicyrtomina minuta.

Here are the peer-reviewed research papers that are featured in this video:

Smith AA, Harrison JS. 2024 Jumping performance and behavior of the globular springtail Dicyrtomina minuta. Integrative Organismal Biology. doi: 10.1093/iob/obae029

Oliveira FGL, Smith AA. 2024. A morphofunctional study of the jumping apparatus in globular springtails. Arthropod Structure and Development. 79: 101333. doi: 10.1016/j.asd.2024.101333

If some of this video seems familiar, it is! I've been putting out springtail videos as these research projects have been happening in the lab. Here are the older springtail videos, some of which have shown this species and parts of the research before:

[...]

This Tiny Backyard Bug Does the Fastest Backflips on Earth

August 29, 2024
Tracey Peake
4-min. read



Composite image of a globular springtail jumping. Image: Adrian Smith

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.

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. The ones in this study are usually out from December through March. Smith “recruited” his research subjects by sifting through leaf litter from his own backyard. But the next part proved to be the most challenging.

[...]