This is a springtail, one of the most common animals on earth.
I found this one right in my backyard, and something like it is probably in yours too.
They’re incredible, but, you can only really see why if you film them like this, at 50,000
frames per second.
What you’re watching is over 1,600 times slower than real-time.
Springtails live their lives in the soil and the leaf litter feeding off of fungus and
decaying plant material.
If you want to see them for yourself here’s what you do, scoop up some leafy debris
along with the top couple centimeters of soil. Throw that into a container with a mesh screen
the bottom and sift that into a second container.
What you’ll be left with are a bunch tiny critters collectively referred to as the soil mesofauna.
These are things like mites, pseudoscorpions, tiny spiders, and the springtails.
And of course, they’re small.
Here’s the one you saw at the beginning of this video on a pencil eraser for scale.
From front to back the total body length is only about 1.7mm.
Their small size isn’t the biggest challenge I face when trying to film springtails.
It’s more about finding a camera fast enough, with high enough resolution to resolve the
flick of their furcula down to the ground.
Last year, I filmed this globular springtail jump
at 73,000 frames per second. That was about at the limit of
what my cameras could do.
At the time, this was probably the clearest image of a springtail jump ever recorded.
But even at this speed, the flick of their tail down to the ground only lasts about 9 frames.
So, a few months ago, the people at vision research lent me this giant TMX phantom camera
for a few days.
It’s one of their most powerful models, And all I did with it was film springtails.
Here’s what working with a springtail on-set looks like.
That little dot in the middle is the animal, and to bring it into frame and focus I move
the whole stage.
It can take hours to capture a good sequence where the animal does the behavior in focus
and at the right orientation to the lens.
Here’s a good sequence I captured at 150,000 frames per second.
It’s twice the speed and twice the pixel resolution of what I had been able to capture
and show you on this channel last year.
This sequence is probably our new, best view of what happens during the jump of a globular springtail.
Up to now, most of my research efforts have been digitizing and describing those jumps.
But globular springtails are very different in body type than other, elongated ones
that you saw at the beginning of this video.
The point of filming those sequences was to compare what’s different between the jumps of these
two types.
Here are 2 sequences captured at 76,000 frames per second.
It only takes the globular on the left 1.5milliseconds to get off the ground, accelerating at 798m/s^2
which is pulling 81g’s.
The elongated springtail on the right takes 4.8 milliseconds to jump, only accelerating
at about 80m/s^2 or just over 8g’s.
I think the performance difference has everything to do with how their furculas work.
The elongated springtail slaps the furcula down against the ground and there seems to
be no tension left in it.
It bends as it is extended behind the body and then just sorts of lifts off the ground.
Whereas the globular has a much quicker flick, and the whole furcula seems to be in-tension
pushing the entire time and even accelerating backwards after the springtail leaves the ground.
A lot of what you saw here will eventually end up in an academic research article.
But what excites me about this stuff, just as much as doing the science,
is seeing it for the first time and sharing it here, with you.
So, thanks for being here and watching this video!