There’s a new high-jump record holder in the insect world. Researchers have discovered that a very common bug has an uncommon trait. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
There’s a new high-jump record holder in the insect world. Researchers have discovered that a very common bug has an uncommon trait. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
For a long time now, everybody
(even insect scientists) thought fleas
were the world champion jumpers,
but the flea has lost its top spot.
The Froghopper, sometimes called
the spittle bug, is the new high-jump
champ. British researchers revealed
in the journal Nature that Froghoppers,
which can be found in your backyard garden,
catapult themselves even higher.
Chris Dietrich is with the Illinois Natural
History Survey. He studies Froghoppers,
but leaves measuring their jumps to
the Brits:
“It really is not just as simple as lining them
up next to each other and seeing how
far they can jump one time. You have to
repeat the experiment many times
under different conditions. So, it could
be a very complicated matter to try to
do this.”
Dietrich says there’s not been a lot
of research on how high bugs jump,
so he wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the
Froghopper doesn’t lose its
high-jump crown to some other bug
that just hasn’t been measured yet.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.