Step aside, Sonic. There’s a new champion in jump spinning—meet the globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta). This tiny hexapod performs backflips that propel it over 60 times its height in an instant, and a recent study sheds light on its remarkable jumping ability.
Globular springtails are minuscule creatures, typically just a few millimeters long. They lack the ability to fly, bite, or sting, but they are exceptional jumpers. In fact, jumping is their primary defense mechanism against predators, and they are so adept at it that they appear to disappear when they leap.
“When globular springtails jump, they don’t just bounce, they perform flips in the air—it’s as close to a real-life Sonic the Hedgehog jump as you can get,” explains Adrian Smith, a research assistant professor of biology at North Carolina State University and the head of the evolutionary biology and behavior lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. “Naturally, I wanted to study how they achieve this.”
Finding globular springtails was straightforward, as they are ubiquitous. The ones involved in this research are typically active from December to March. Smith collected his subjects by sifting through leaf litter in his backyard. However, the next step proved to be quite challenging.
“Globular springtails jump so rapidly that it’s nearly impossible to see in real-time,” Smith remarks. “Using a regular camera, you’d catch them in one frame and then see them disappear. If you zoom in on the image, you might notice faint trails of vapor left behind from their flips.”
Smith tackled this issue by using cameras that capture 40,000 frames per second. He encouraged the springtails to jump with light or by gently prodding them with a paintbrush. He then analyzed their launch, speed, distance, and landing technique.
Interestingly, globular springtails do not rely on their legs for jumping. Instead, they utilize a specialized appendage known as a furca, which folds under their abdomen and has a small, forked structure at the tip. When they jump, the furca snaps downward, and the forked end pushes against the ground, propelling them into several rapid backflips.
What do we mean by rapid?
“A globular springtail needs just one thousandth of a second to backflip off the ground, reaching an incredible peak rotation rate of 368 times per second,” Smith states. “They achieve their jump acceleration at a similar pace to fleas, but they add impressive spins. No other animal can perform a backflip as quickly as a globular springtail.”
Moreover, these springtails can launch themselves over 60 millimeters high—over 60 times their own height. Interestingly, they most often jump backward.
“They can angle into a jump, moving slightly sideways, but when they leap from a flat surface, they primarily go up and back, rather than forward,” notes Jacob Harrison, a postdoctoral researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-author of the study. “Their tendency to jump backward suggests that this behavior is mainly a survival tactic rather than a method of movement.”
When it comes to landing, they exhibit two styles: uncontrolled and anchored. Springtails have a sticky forked tube that they can extend to grab onto surfaces or stop their movement, but Smith observed that bouncing and tumbling to a stop was just as frequent as controlled landings.
“This study is the first comprehensive analysis of the jumping abilities of globular springtails, and what they can do is almost unbelievably impressive,” Smith remarks. “This serves as a fantastic reminder of the incredible and often unexplored organisms living all around us.”
