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
→ Continue reading at Science News