Wherever you are in the world, an insect like one of these: a leafhopper, a treehopper,
a froghopper, or a planthopper is likely right outside, not far from
your door. They're all incredible insects, just watch what they can do.
A few months ago, I put out a video about springtail jumps. Springtails are tiny
soil arthropods they have a spring-loaded appendage that they can
use to perform really fast spinning jumps. To figure out how to best analyze
that behavior I looked at what other researchers have done to describe high-
speed insect jumps. Some of the coolest research papers I found were ones on
jumping insects in the order Hemiptera, and most of them, like this one, were done
by professor Malcolm Burrows. These papers are incredible. They're filled
with illustrations, electron micrographs, and high-speed video sequences. I'll link
to some of them in the video description. Most of them are free to download.
Though these papers are the best scientific descriptions of hemipteran jumps, the
videos in them were made strictly for scientific analysis. I can't find a
single good video here on YouTube that shows how amazing these insect jumps are.
So, I collected a bunch and filmed them. It actually wasn't too hard to do
because these insects are super-common. All eight or nine different species
you'll see in this video were collected here in my yard or in a park just down
the street. If you stick around to the end of the video I'll show you how you
can go out and collect your own and actually see this jumping behavior in
person. My favorite kind of hopper might be a leafhopper. There are over 22,000
described species. And you can tell them apart from other types by the four rows
of spines that run down their hind tibia. Like all the insects in this video, they
have needle and straw-like mouth parts to pierce plant stems and feed on the
sap. They have to take in so much sap to extract the nutrients they need, they end
up excreting a ton of sugary honeydew. And they can do that in fantastic
fashion, too. But this video isn't about their skills and excrement flinging it's
about them doing this.
Though adult leafhoppers have wings they usually get airborne by jumping. Like all
hoppers they only use their hind legs to jump. But they don't use big heavy
muscles in their legs to do it. Which you can tell by how long and skinny their
legs are. Instead, the muscles they use attach to the base of their legs and
extend into the thorax. To power the jumps, the muscles contract to briefly
store energy which, when it's released, rotates this segment near the base of
their legs called the trochanter. All the hoppers you'll see in this video jump
by rapidly rotating that same leg segment. One thing I really like about
leafhopper jumps is how they link their legs by pushing the tips of them
together like this when they go and push off the ground into a jump. In terms of
speed, in this sequence it takes the leaf hopper just over six milliseconds to
accelerate its body off the ground and into a jump. It accelerates at a rate
of 148 meters per second squared which is equivalent to experiencing just under
15 G's. Treehoppers, a different family of hemipterans, are some of the coolest
looking insects on earth! They're famous for their incredible helmets which are
outgrowths of the pro-thoracic segments, directly behind their heads. In some
species they form huge spikes earning them their other common name of thorn
bugs. With all the treehoppers I filmed, their jumps are preceded by a bunch of
wing flapping. They don't ever lift off the ground using their wings, instead
they kind of flap and warm them up, hold them out, and then once they've launched
themselves off the ground their wings kick in for flight.
When Burrows described their jumps he found that they can accelerate at up to
2,400 meters per second squared which is over twice as fast as the best-
performing long-legged leafhoppers.
The next group is the planthoppers. There are over 12,000 species within
this group. Jumps of the ones I filmed seemed chaotic in comparison to leaf-
and treehoppers. They tumble up into the air
flipping end-over-end and rolling. This is likely due to either an out-of-sync
release and extension of the legs or one of the legs slipping as they enter the
jump. Either way, once in the air, they stabilize their trajectories when the
wings are engaged and they start flying.
In terms of speed this derbid planthopper accelerates at 500 meters per
second squared and experiences over 50 G's at take off. One way some planthoppers
have solved this out-of-sync leg problem is by actually using gears. In a
2013 paper, Burrows described the planthopper nymph as the only animal we know
of that has functional moving gears. At the base of their legs on the rapidly-
rotating trochanters a series of interlacing teeth keep leg rotations in-sync.
Strangely, the gears are lost once the planthoppers reach the final
adult stage. And they switch to rely on a different method. The last are froghoppers,
which are also known as spittlebugs. The spittlebug name comes from the
ability of the nymphs to turn their sap excrement into a frothy protective mass
of spittle. Some froghoppers are among the fastest jumping insects ever
recorded, accelerating at an astounding 5,400 meters per second squared, which is
just under 550 g-force. This big two-line spittlebug I was able to film was a much
slower jumper. And its hind legs kept slipping on the platform which sent it
rolling and flipping end over end until, like the planthoppers, it gained
control using its wings. So, aren't these insects incredible?!
I should mention that some of them do have some downsides for us, though. Since they
are insects that make their living feeding off of plants, some of them can be
pretty destructive to our crops. A recent example of this is the spotted lanternfly.
A planthopper that has now spread throughout the mid-atlantic states where
it threatens fruit crops and hardwood trees. So, because of this, one of the
places you'll see these insects is on the labels of insecticides like this one
here. That's kind of sad. Don't go looking for them with this. Instead go out and
try to catch some with one of these, an insect net. If you use the net to sweep
across grasses or brushy vegetation, you're likely to find a bunch.
I collected all the hoppers in this video either through sweep-netting or just
collecting them by hand off of vegetation. So, I hope after watching this
you'll go out and find some hoppers on your own. And if you like this video
please subscribe to this channel and check out the rest of our videos.
Thanks for watching!