fleas dethroned as jumping champs

At the Insect Olympics, the froghopper, also known as the spittlebug, has just set the world record for the high jump. The tiny, thumbtack-sized insect can reach heights of 70 centimeters (more than 2 feet), equivalent to a man leaping 700 feet, reports Malcolm Burrows of University of Cambridge in England in the July 31 Nature. Burrows used a high-speed camera to study the bug’s jumping mechanism. In hopping, the insect can accelerate to more than 400 times the force of gravity as its immensely powerful hind legs explosively release stored energy, catapulting it into the air. These legs are used exclusively for jumping and are merely dragged along the ground during walking. According to Burrows, the froghoppers exceed “the height jumped by the flea relative to body length,” accelerate four times faster than fleas, and exert triple the force in jumping. “Fleas are considered to be the champion jumpers, but here I show that froghoppers are in fact the real champions,” he writes. Go froghoppers!

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 8/05/2003.