Move over, Simone Biles. Nature’s gold medalist for backflips is a millimeter-tall arthropod that can barely straddle the tip of a pencil.
Despite its size, the globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta) can vault itself 60 mm in the air, spinning at a rate as fast as 368 times per second, researchers report 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, Smith says, a useful trick for evading predators. To reveal the secrets of the arthropods’ escape acrobatics, he and biomechanist Jacob Harrison of Georgia Tech in Atlanta analyzed high-speed footage of more than a dozen springtails from liftoff to landing.