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Pygmy mole crickets leap from water with spring-loaded oars on their legs
When Malcolm Burrows first heard the sound of a pygmy mole cricket leaping from water, he was enjoying a sandwich. Burrows, a zoologist from the University of Cambridge, was visiting Cape Town and had snuck out the back of the local zoology department to eat his lunch by a pond. “I heard sporadic thwacking noises coming from the water,” he says. “When I looked more closely I could see small black insects jumping repeatedly from the water and heading towards the bank.”
They were pygmy mole crickets, a group of tiny insects just a few millimetres long. Despite their name, they’re more grasshoppers than crickets, and are some of the most primitive members of this group. They’re found on every continent except Antarctica.
Pygmy mole crickets cannot fly, but they can certainly jump. Burrows collected some of the individuals from the pond, and took them back to the lab to film them with high-speed cameras. When they take off, they often spin head-over-tail, but what they lack in elegance they make up for in distance. They can jump over 1.4 metres, more than 280 times their own body length.
Doing this on land is one thing, but as Burrows saw at the pond, these insects can also jump from water. This ability serves them well—they live in burrows near to fresh water, which frequently flood. Their leaps send them back to terra firma, saving their lives.
Burrows found that these insects jump from water in a completely new way. Animals like pond-skaters and the basilisk lizard can walk on water by relying on surface tension—the tendency of the surface of water to resist an external force. But the mole cricket extends its hind legs so quickly that they break right through the surface.
As the legs move through the water, three pairs of flat paddles and two pairs of long spurs flare out from each one. These structures have a concave shape, much like an oar. As they flare out, they increase the surface area of the mole cricket’s leg by around 2.4 times, allowing it to push down on a much larger volume of water. And once the legs are fully extended, the paddles retract to reduce the drag on the airborne insect. From water, the mole crickets can only jump for 3 centimetres or so. That’s pathetic compared to their land-based attempts, but still more than 5 times their body length, and enough to save them from drowning.
When Burrows shone ultraviolet light onto the paddles, they glowed with a bright blue colour at their bases. That’s the signature of resilin, an incredibly elastic protein that powers the jumps and wingbeats of many insects. Its presence on the mole cricket suggests that the paddles and spurs are spring-loaded.
“It just shows what amazing things can be found close to where we live and work,” says Burrows. “Instead of spending time exploring the more exotic parts of South Africa, I spent most of my visit there essentially looking outside my back door.”
Reference: Burrows & Sutton. 2012. Pygmy mole crickets jump from water. Current Biology 22: R990
All photos and video by Malcolm Burrows
I’ve got your missing links right here (1 December 2012)
Top picks
This slow-motion video of a cheetah running is the most incredible thing I’ve seen all…. Well, it’s incredible. Note how freakishly steady the head is! And focus on one foot – watch how much distance the animal covers between the foot lifting off and coming down again! And do NOT miss the end, where you see how it looks in real-time.
The closest planet to the sun has loads of ice! Amazing news about Mercury!
Human Evolution [Is Going Through] an Exciting New Phase – excellent piece by Brandon Keim
Stunningly good read about a man’s journey from earache to brain tumour to coma, and the ensuing end-of-life court battle.
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Every single sentence in Time’s description of the Higgs boson is wrong.
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Beautiful photo series of the sublime slime mould Dictyostelium, by Alex Wild
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Fantastic critique of the NYT’s oversold “immortal jellyfish” story, by Paul Raeburn.
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Scientists say they can track early human movements over 7,000 years ago by analysing molecules in ancient poo.
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From Charles Darwin’s pigeons to moon rock, London’s Natural History Museum celebrates its most prized items.
Great NYT interactive on the extent to which rising seas will submerge U.S. cities
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Journalism/internet/society
Massive congratulations to Suzi Gage and David Colquhoun for winning the first UK Science Blog Prize.
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Pentagon: autonomous robots won’t be allowed to kill you, but they can spy on you and hack you. YAYSES!
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Spaun, the simulated brain that performs simple tasks
There have been many attempts to create a virtual brain, by simulating massive networks of neurons. But brains aren’t just piles of neurons. They also do things. They perceive. They reason. They solve tasks. Enter Spaun – the first brain simulation that actually shows simple behaviour, from recognising and copying a number, to solving simple reasoning problems.
It simulates 2.5 million virtual neurons, including the electricity that course through them, and the signalling chemicals that pass between them. It’s almost as accurate as the average humans at 8 separate tasks and, rather delightfully, reproduces many of our strange quirks – like the tendency to remember items at the start and end of a list.
I’ve written about Spaun for Nature News. Head over there for more
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We’re back… but comments have changed.
The good news: the blogs are back online, and speeds are back to normal. Thanks for your patience.
The bad news: the comment system has now changed so that you can only comment after you have created an account and signed in. This overwrites my old comment policy of being able to comment freely once your first comment is approved.
For the record, I found out about this change on Monday and I’m not happy about it. If you feel the same, just bear with me – I’ll have an update in a week or so. Or feel free to voice your views by… erm… registering and leaving a comment, or sending me an email.
In the meantime, plenty of cool science coming up…
DNA Lego bricks produce nano-sculptures
For tens of thousands of years, humans have created sculptures by carving pieces from a solid block. They have chipped away at stone, metal, wood and ceramics, creating art by subtracting material. Now, a group of scientists from Harvard University have figured out how to do the same thing with DNA.
First, Yonggang Ke builds a solid block of DNA from individual Lego-like bricks. Each one is a single strand of the famous double helix that folds into a U-shape, designed to interlock with four neighbours. You can see what happens in the diagram below, which visualises the strands as two-hole Lego bricks. Together, hundreds of them can anneal into a solid block. And because each brick has a unique sequences, it only sticks to certain neighbours, and occupies a set position in the block.
This means that Ke can create different shapes by leaving out specific bricks from the full set, like a sculptor removing bits of stone from a block. Starting with a thousand-brick block, he carved out 102 different shapes, with complex features like cavities, tunnels, and embossed symbols. Each one is just 25 nanometres wide in any direction, roughly the size of the smallest viruses.
Bear with us…
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Enter the hyperparasites – wasps that lay eggs in wasps that lay eggs in caterpillars
(Left by Nina Fatouros, centre by Hans Smid, right by Harald Süpfle)
A very hungry caterpillar munches on a cabbage leaf and sets off an alarm. The plant releases chemicals into the air, signalling that it is under attack. This alarm is intercepted by a wasp, which stings the caterpillar and implants it with eggs. When they hatch, the larval wasps devour their host from the inside, eventually bursting out to spin cocoons and transform into adults. The cabbage (and those around it) are saved, and the wasp—known as a parasitoid because of its fatal body-snatching habits—raises the next generation.
But that’s not the whole story.
Some parasitic wasps are “hyperparasitoids”—they target other parasitoid wasps. And they also track the cabbage’s alarm chemicals, so they can find infected caterpillars. When they do, they lay their eggs on any wasp grubs or pupae that they find. Their young devour the young of the other would-be parasites, in a tiered stack of body-snatching. It’s like a cross between the films Alien and Inception.
Will we ever… make a safe cigarette?
Here’s the 13th piece from my BBC column
There’s an old saying among people who work in public health: Tobacco is the only legal product that, when used as intended, will kill you. Decades of research have thoroughly documented the health problems that result from inhaling tobacco smoke – more than a dozen different types of cancer, heart disease, stroke, emphysema and other respiratory diseases, among others. Are these risks an inevitable part of smoking? Or is there a way of creating safe cigarettes without any of these hazards?
“I think it’s very unlikely,” says Stephen Hecht from the University of Minnesota Cancer Center, who studies tobacco carcinogens – substances that cause cancer. Tobacco smoke is a complex cocktail of at least 4,000 chemicals including at least 70 known carcinogens. No one has made a “cigarette that is significantly decreased in all of these [chemicals] and is still something people would want to smoke, even though the industry has worked on this for around 50 years,” says Hecht. “There’s no indication that it’s possible.”
I've got your missing links right here (24 November 2012)
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Neurons can silence each other without any direct connections
The chatter in your brain largely depends on special junctions called synapses – meeting places between two neurons, through which they transmit chemical signals or electric currents.
But neurons don’t always need synapses to communicate—some in the antennae of a fly can influence one another without any direct connections. The electric field produced by one can silence its neighbour, like two individuals standing side by side and whispering “Sssssshhhh” at each other.
This phenomenon, known as ephaptic coupling, has been discussed for a long time but it’s always been a bit obscure and arcane. There are very few examples of it, and none where this indirect silencing actually affects an animal’s behaviour. Su has changed that – his study shows that ephaptic coupling affects a fly’s or mosquito’s sense of smell. That knowledge might be useful for protecting crops from hungry insects, or people from disease-carrying ones.
I’ve written about this story for The Scientist, so head over there for more details.
Image by Martin Hauser
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