This Little Garden Bug Does the Fastest Backflip on the Planet

Let loose, Sonic. There’s a new spin-jumping champion in town: the globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta). This tiny hexapod backflips through the air, spinning to over 60 times its size in the blink of an eye, and a new study presents the first in-depth look at its leaping prowess.

Globular springtails are tiny, usually only a few millimeters long. They don’t fly, bite, or sting. But they can jump. In fact, jumping is their preferred (and only) strategy for avoiding predators. And they excel at it: to the naked eye, they appear to disappear completely when they take flight.

“When springtails jump, they don’t just jump up and down, they flip through the air. It’s the closest thing we can get to Sonic the Hedgehog jumping in real life,” says Adrian Smith, a research assistant professor of biology at North Carolina State University and director of the Evolutionary Biology and Behavior Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. “So I naturally wanted to see how they do it.”

The work appears in Integrative Biology of Organisms. Smith is the corresponding author.

Finding the globular springtails wasn’t hard: They’re all around us. The ones in this study are typically around from December to March. Smith “recruited” his research subjects by digging through the leaf litter in his own garden. But the next part proved the hardest.

“Globular springtails jump so fast that you can’t see them in real time,” Smith says. “If you try to film the jump with a regular camera, the springtail will appear in one frame and then disappear. If you look closely at the image, you can see faint wisps of vapor left behind where it flipped into the frame.”

Smith solved this problem by using cameras that shoot 40,000 frames per second. He coaxed the springtails to jump by shining a light on them or lightly tapping them with an artist’s paintbrush. He then watched how they took off, how fast and far they went, and how they landed.

Globular springtails do not use their legs to jump. Instead, they have an appendage called a furca that folds under their abdomen and has a small forked structure at the end. When springtails jump, the furca flips downward and the forked tip pushes against the ground, launching them into a series of incredibly fast backflies.

What do we mean by incredibly fast?

“It takes only a thousandth of a second for a globular springtail to do a backflip off the ground, and it can reach a top speed of 368 rotations per second,” Smith says. “It accelerates its body to do a jump at about the same speed as a flea, but it also spins. No other animal on Earth can do a backflip faster than a globular springtail.”

Springtails were also able to launch themselves more than 60 millimeters into the air, more than 60 times their own height. And in most cases, they launched themselves backwards.

“They can lean to jump and move slightly to the side, but when they take off from a flat surface, they move primarily up and backward, never forward,” says Jacob Harrison, a postdoctoral researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-author of the paper. “Their inability to jump forward tells us that jumping is primarily a means of escaping danger, rather than a form of general locomotion.”

Landing occurred in two ways: uncontrolled and anchored. Globular springtails have a sticky forked tube that they can flip (or push out of their body) to grab onto a surface or stop their momentum, but Smith observed that bouncing and tumbling to a stop were just as common as anchored landings.

“This is the first time anyone has done a complete description of the jumping performance of the globular springtail, and what they’re doing is almost unbelievably spectacular,” Smith says. “It’s a great example of how we can find incredible, and largely undescribed, organisms living all around us.”