How a Tiny Globular Springtail Can Perform the Fastest Backflips on Earth

Scientist Adrian Smith of Ant Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences captured slow motion footage of tiny globular springtail hexapods leaping up and performing an incredible amount of backflips as they were airborne, making them the fastest flippers in the natural world.

There’s no other animal on earth that can do a backflip faster than these can. These are globular springtails. They complete their full body rotations in under 1 one hundredth of a second, and this species can reach a rotational rate of 368 flips per second. And their flips don’t stop once they get off the ground. Here you can see a full trajectory where the springtail flips 21 times in a span of just 0.15 seconds.

Smith further explained that the height and speed of the flips are helped with an extra appendage called the furcula, which helps the springtail with such tasks as jumping, balance, and righting itself. This footage was for a research paper that Smith published with fellow scientist JS Harrison.

I published new research describing how globular springtails jump! This video summarizes some of that work and shows all of the ways we filmed and visualized all the components of their jumps. The globular species we researched is Dicyrtomina minuta.