How a Tiny Globular Springtail Can Perform the Fastest Backflips on Earth
Scientist Adrian SmithofAnt Lab at theNorth Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences captured slow motion footage of tiny globular springtail hexapods leaping up and performing an incredible amount of backflips as they were airborne, making them the fastest flippers in the natural world.
There's no other animal on earth that can do abackflip faster than these can. These areglobular springtails. They complete their full bodyrotations in under 1 one hundredth of a second,and this species can reach a rotationalrate of 368 flips per second. And theirflips don't stop once they get offthe ground. Here you can see a fulltrajectory where the springtail flips21 times in a span of just 0.15 seconds.
Smith further explained that the height and speed of the flips are helped with an extra appendage called the furcula, which helps the springtail with such tasks as jumping, balance, and righting itself. This footage was for a research paper that Smith published with fellow scientist JS Harrison.
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.
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Smith had previously spotlighted springtails and their amazing jumping ability.