Springtails bounce Dr. Adrian Smith into discoveries on Collembola behavior
Dr. Adrian Smith
North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University
This past winter I noticed something incredible, actually a bunch of things, right outside my door. The things came crawling out of the ground in my yard. Noticing things crawling out of the ground is part of my job. I’m an entomologist who has specialized in studying ants for the past 15 years. But this was different, these weren’t ants. They weren’t even insects. Covering my back patio, my garbage cans, and the leaf litter were thousands of globular springtails, tiny soil arthropods.
I scooped some up, brought them into the lab, and fired up my high-speed video camera. My scientific specialty is insect behavior. So, when I see some tiny creatures doing something unusual my first instinct is to grab a camera and film it. What I captured with these springtails astounded me. The common name “springtail” describes these organisms’ spring-loaded “tail” (an appendage called a ‘furcula’), which they hold folded underneath their body. When they spring it into action, it slams against the ground and flings the creature into the air. It’s spectacular. They accelerate upwards at a rate of 700m/s2 while flipping, end-over-end, at rates over 350 flips/sec. No other type of animal gets airborne like these little arthropods do.
Springtails, or their more formal name Collembola, are a class of arthropods separate from insects. They are some of the most abundant soil arthropods on earth. There’s a good chance that wherever you are, if you go scrounge around in the soil, you’ll find some. What excites me most about these animals is that they are in a sweet spot for scientific discovery and description. Take their spectacular jumping behavior for instance. There’s only one published study that accurately measures the jump performance of a globular springtail. That was a species in Japan. The other 1,200 or so species, including the one in my yard, have yet to receive much attention.
So, now that I’ve noticed something so spectacular right in my own backyard, I can’t help but spend more time studying it. My students and I, in our lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, have begun an effort to film and describing the jumping behaviors of these creatures. Because the footage we’re getting of these animals is too cool not to share, we’ve put together some of what we’ve captured in the video below. It’s just the start. Check back with us in a year or so and I’m sure we’ll have more to share.