FLIPPING OUT
Move over Sonic – remarkable video shows tiny bug that performs the fastest backflips on Earth
The crazy critters don't even use their legs to perform their masterful spin, scientists say
A TINY bug has been crowned as the world's fastest backflip performer giving Sonic a run for his money.
The globular springtail is able to spin over 60 times its body height in the blink of an eye, remarkable video has revealed.
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It's so tiny and fast that with the naked eye the critters look as though they vanish entirely when taking off.
Globular springtails are usually only a couple millimetres in length and can't fly, bite or sting.
But scientists have uncovered that backflips are their secret talent to fend off hungry predators.
"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," explained Adrian Smith, research assistant professor of biology at North Carolina State University.
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"So naturally I wanted to see how they do it."
Ordinary cameras and smartphones aren't capable of capturing the bugs in action.
So researchers had to use specialist cameras that shoot 40,000 frames per second.
They then shined a light on them or gave them a gentle prod with an artist's paintbrush to encourage them to backflip.
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"Globular springtails jump so fast that you can’t see it in real time," Smith continued.
"If you try to film the jump with a regular camera, the springtail will appear in one frame, then vanish.
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"When you look at the picture closely, you can see faint vapor trail curlicues left behind where it flipped through the one frame."
It turns out these curious creatures don't use their legs to pull off their spinning feat.
Instead, they use an appendage that folds up underneath their abdomen called a furca.
The furca has a little, forked structure at its tip which pushes against the ground as the furca flips down, launching the springtails into the wild spin.
When a springtail blasts themselves off, they go more than 60 millimetres into the air, which is over 60 times their own height.
In most cases, they went backward.
"It only takes a globular springtail one thousandth of a second to backflip off the ground and they can reach a peak rate of 368 rotations per second,” Smith said.
"They accelerate their bodies into a jump at about the same rate as a flea, but on top of that they spin.
"No other animal on earth does a backflip faster than a globular springtail."
Experts also noticed that the bugs have two styles of performing the backflip, uncontrolled and anchored.
The springtails have a sticky forked tube they can push out of their bodies to grab hold of a surface or halt their momentum.
But bouncing and tumbling to a stop was just as common as anchored landings.
Jacob Harrison, a postdoctoral researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and paper co-author said: "They can lean into a jump and go slightly sideways, but when launching from a flat surface, they mostly travel up and backward, never forward.
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Their inability to jump forward was an indication to us that jumping is primarily a means to escape danger, rather than a form of general locomotion."
The findings were published in the Integrative Organismal Biology journal.
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