How an arthropod pulls off the world’s fastest backflip

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 bugs from liftoff to landing.

Liftoff starts with a thump, as the springtail lets loose a springlike appendage called the furca from its underbelly (SN: 11/7/22). That thump propels the arthropods backward as fast as 1.5 meters per second, on average, the researchers found. While airborne, the globs spin anywhere from 14 to 29 times.

Some flights end less than gracefully, with springtails crashing back to Earth and bouncing about until they come to a stop. More often, the bugs stuck the landing by deploying a sticky tube typically used for grooming, the team found. “It’s a sort of anchor that pulls them to their feet so they can get on with their day,” Smith says. 

“We sometimes get told that the only exciting parts of nature are fossilized in the ground or hidden in a tropical rainforest somewhere,” Smith says. To him, these springtails show that everyday organisms are pulling off incredible feats all around us, we just have to look.