PREVIEW

Eat your heart out, Simone Biles, a new gymnastics champion has emerged in the animal world – the globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta).

This tiny hexapod, barely a couple of millimetres in length, backflips into the air, reaching over 60 times its body height and rotating more than 360 times in a split second, according to a new study providing the first detailed analysis of its jumping ability.

If 1.42 metre-tall Biles could jump as high in relation to her own stature, it would mean she could backflip higher than 85 metres - meaning she’d be able to jump over the head of the Statue of Liberty.

There’s a very good reason globular springtails can jump this high. Their gymnastic feats are their only defence against predators. Now, scientists at North Carolina State University have explained how they do it.

“Globular springtails jump so fast that you can’t see it in real time,” Adrian Smith, a research assistant professor of biology at North Carolina State University and head of the evolutionary biology and behaviour research lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. “If you try to film the jump with a regular camera, they’ll appear in one frame and vanish in the next.”

“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,” explains Smith. “So naturally, I wanted to see how they do it.”

Springtails, abundant in leaf litter and soil, are easily found outdoors. Smith gathered his research subjects from his own backyard, but filming their jumps posed a challenge.

To capture their movements, Smith employed high-speed cameras shooting 40,000 frames per second. Using a paintbrush or light, he triggered the springtails to jump, then analysed their take-off speed, trajectory, and landing.

Unlike most jumping animals, globular springtails don’t use their legs. Instead, they rely on a specialised appendage called a furca, which unfolds from underneath their abdomen. The forked tip of the furca pushes against the ground, propelling them into a rapid backflip.

“It only takes a globular springtail one thousandth of a second to backflip off the ground,” Smith reveals. “They can reach a peak rate of 368 rotations per second. No other animal does a backflip faster than a globular springtail.”

These springtails can jump more than 60 times their own height, typically launching themselves backwards rather than forwards. Jacob Harrison, a co-author from the Georgia Institute of Technology, notes, “Their inability to jump forward indicates that jumping is primarily a way to escape danger, not a form of general movement.”

The study also observed two landing styles: anchored and uncontrolled. Springtails can either stick to a surface using a sticky forked tube or bounce and tumble to a stop.

“This is the first time anyone has fully described the globular springtail’s jump,” says Smith. “What they do is almost impossibly spectacular. It’s a reminder of the incredible, often overlooked creatures living all around us.”