Hey there! Today, we’re diving into the world of some of the fastest creatures on our planet. You might think of cheetahs or falcons when you hear “fastest animals,” but prepare to be surprised! We’re talking about tiny bugs that can accelerate faster than anything else on Earth. Let’s explore how they do it!
Imagine an animal that can go from 0 to 200 miles per hour faster than you can blink. These tiny creatures can accelerate so quickly that it would turn a human into jelly! And guess what? They can fit right on your fingertip. These bugs have mastered the art of storing and releasing energy in ways that even our best inventions can’t match.
To understand how these bugs achieve such incredible speeds, we need to talk about some physics. Speed is how fast you’re going, while acceleration is how quickly you change your speed. To accelerate, you need to put in energy. But here’s the catch: things naturally resist changes in motion due to inertia. Inertia is a property of matter that makes objects want to keep doing what they’re already doing.
When it comes to moving objects, mass matters. The bigger the mass, the more energy you need to move it. That’s why these tiny bugs can accelerate so quickly—they have very little mass, so they need less energy to move fast.
These speedy bugs have a secret weapon: springs! A spring is a device that stores energy and releases it quickly. Think of it like a tightly wound coil that snaps back into place when released. Insects like springtails and froghoppers use parts of their exoskeletons as springs to launch themselves into the air.
Springtails, for example, have a special appendage that acts like a spring. When they release it, they can jump with an acceleration of 700 meters per second squared—much faster than a cheetah! Froghoppers, on the other hand, use a latch mechanism to lock their legs in place, storing energy until they’re ready to jump.
But the fastest acceleration record doesn’t belong to jumping bugs. It goes to trap-jaw ants and Dracula ants, which can snap their jaws shut at mind-blowing speeds. Trap-jaw ants use their heads as springs, snapping their jaws with an acceleration of around 100,000 g’s—more than a bullet leaving a gun!
These ants use their jaw snaps not just for catching prey but also for escaping danger. By snapping their jaws against the ground, they can catapult themselves away from predators.
So, why can’t humans achieve these speeds? It all comes down to size. These tiny creatures can handle such extreme accelerations because they are small. The laws of physics apply differently to them than to larger animals like us. While humans can endure some high speeds, like in rocket sled tests, we can’t match the acceleration of these tiny bugs.
These incredible creatures show us how nature has evolved simple yet effective solutions to achieve amazing feats. By using springs and latches, these bugs have become the fastest animals on Earth. It’s a reminder of the wonders of evolution and the fascinating ways animals adapt to their environments.
Stay curious and keep exploring the amazing world of science!
Use simple materials like rubber bands and paper clips to create a model of a springtail. Experiment with different designs to see how far and fast you can make your model jump. This will help you understand how these bugs use stored energy to achieve incredible speeds.
Set up a small race track and use toy cars to explore the concepts of speed and acceleration. Try adding weights to the cars to see how mass affects acceleration. This activity will give you a hands-on understanding of the physics principles discussed in the article.
Choose one of the insects mentioned in the article, like the trap-jaw ant or froghopper, and research more about its habitat, behavior, and adaptations. Create a presentation to share your findings with the class, highlighting what makes your chosen insect unique.
Using your knowledge from the article, design your own fast animal. Think about how it would store and release energy, its size, and how it would use its speed. Draw your animal and write a short description of its abilities and adaptations.
Watch slow-motion videos of fast-moving animals, such as cheetahs or falcons, and compare them to the insects discussed in the article. Analyze the videos to identify the differences in speed and acceleration, and discuss why these differences exist.
**Sanitized Transcript:**
**Dianna:** Hey… recording!
**Joe:** Yeah
**Dianna:** You did it! This is my friend Dianna. You probably know her from Physics Girl.
**Dianna:** How’s it going?
**Joe:** I needed to show you something because I’m not a physicist, I don’t know physics like you do.
**Dianna:** Ok, that’s what I’m here for. I’m about to show her one of the fastest animals in nature. You might be picturing something like this. Or this… or even this. But you’d be wrong. The actual fastest animals on Earth can accelerate from 0 to 200 miles per hour five thousand times faster than the blink of an eye. They can pull enough g’s to turn your body into jello. And they could hang out on your fingertip.
**Dianna:** Whoooooaah… (laughing) oh my gosh, what is it even doing? Oh my gosh, you silly bug! These tiny animals can store and release energy in some mind-blowing ways, even better than some of our most advanced inventions. And today, using some super-slow-motion macro video, and a little physics, we’re going to answer this question: How fast ARE the fastest animals, and how do they do it?
[OPEN]
**Joe:** Hey smart people, Joe here. So humans have reached some pretty impressive speeds. Of course, there are different ways to go fast. One option is you can speed up very slowly, for a long time, like NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. Its ion thrusters put out less force than it takes to push a single key on a keyboard, but it accelerated to over 11 km per second by firing that tiny engine for nearly six years. But the real challenge is getting going fast, quickly. And that’s where teeny-tiny bugs leave humans in the dust – along with pretty much every other large animal on Earth.
This awesome footage was captured by Adrian Smith, a biologist who developed a bit of an obsession with studying nature’s tiny speed freaks. And thanks to his YouTube channel, so have I. But before we go any farther, let’s get back to our friend Dianna, so she can explain the unique physics problem that these insects have solved:
**Dianna:** So we’re talking about little bugs, jumping fast. Velocity is just how fast you’re going, in what direction. Acceleration is changing your speed or the direction that you’re going, and that’s where you’ve gotta put in effort. I have to put in some energy to change my velocity. Now imagine you wanted to change the speed really fast. The thing is, things just want to stay going the way they’re going, and the same speed, or they want to stay not moving if they’re not moving. Things resist changes in motion. They have inertia. And as you may know… Inertia is a property of matter.
The last piece of analyzing a change in speed is to think about mass. If I want to push something up to speed, like pushing a larger object, it takes a lot of effort, but pushing a smaller object doesn’t take nearly as much effort. And pushing a tiny being up to speed, I would just have to flick it!
So… you wanna flick tiny beings up to speed? For science?
Don’t flick tiny beings.
So there’s an equation that describes the relationship Dianna’s talking about: the equation for kinetic energy. Energy is on the left, and on the right side we have an “m” in there for mass. This means that if we have a bigger mass, then the energy we have to put in to move increases at the same rate. It’s a linear relationship. And that means if we have a smaller mass, then it takes less energy to move.
Having a tiny mass is what lets those bugs accelerate faster than just about any other animals on Earth. But studying how they do that isn’t easy, because first, you gotta catch ‘em… or Adrian does, anyway.
So recently I was surprised when a bunch of really cool bugs showed up right outside my door. These are springtails on the lid of my trash can. Springtails are tiny soil arthropods that launch themselves into the air to avoid predators, or in this case my finger. Springtail jumping hasn’t been studied much, so I collected those and brought them back here to the lab to film them with this high-speed camera. Filming them is a challenge; these springtails are tiny, so the best way to handle them is to push them around with a tiny paintbrush. Then the challenge is to follow them around with the camera and hope they jump while you’ve got them both in frame and in focus.
When I did manage to catch some on film, what I saw was astounding. These springtails go really fast, really quickly, clocking an upwards acceleration of 700 meters per second squared… in a fraction of a second, which is almost 20 times the acceleration of a top fuel dragster, and about a hundred times quicker than an accelerating cheetah. “Fastest animal on Earth”? I don’t think so.
To do what these bugs do, even with their tiny mass, they have to store and release a ton of energy all at once. Enough energy to send a springtail spinning at 374 flips per second–almost 40 times faster than a spinning helicopter rotor. But when scientists crunched the numbers, they were confused because muscles alone are physically incapable of producing that much energy in such a short amount of time. It’s the limitations of biology. Muscle tissue can only contract so fast, which means it can only provide a finite amount of energy to accelerate. That’s why humans can’t throw a thousand-mile-per-hour fastball. These bugs must be releasing that energy using something other than muscle power alone.
The answer? It’s right in the name: They use springs.
So what is a spring? A spring is a mechanical device that stores energy to be released later, usually very quickly. The idea of springs is that you usually put in energy over a longer amount of time, like you incrementally compress it or stretch it, and then it snaps back really fast. The conventional spring is like the wound, tight coil of wire. Get down to the microscopic level and you’ve got bonds between all these atoms and molecules, and you’re stretching those apart. So when you release the spring, those atoms and molecules all snap back into place. And you get this release of energy. Typically, you push or pull something really fast.
So actually, a spring is often made of little mini-springs, like all the atoms and molecules act like springs themselves. The main idea with a spring is you can slowly store energy using a small amount of force over a longer time, and then release that energy very quickly to do a lot of work. Only instead of atoms in a metal being stretched like in a traditional spring, insects and other super-fast creatures with exoskeletons, like the mantis shrimp, store and release energy using their exoskeletons, which are made of flexible and stiff materials mixed together. That’s called a “composite” material, and engineers use them all the time.
A springtail’s launching appendage is part of its exoskeleton, and it stores energy just like the spring on a mousetrap. It stays locked and loaded until… [mouse trap demo]. What’s crazy is springtails aren’t even close to the bug acceleration record.
These are froghoppers, little insects you might find sucking juices out of plants… and in addition to looking very weird and cool, they’re among the fastest jumping insects ever recorded. The fastest froghoppers can accelerate at 5400 m/s², just under 550 g’s. Froghoppers, and their cousins planthoppers and leafhoppers, do this using an incredibly cool simple machine. They draw up their hind jumping legs, lock them in place with an actual latch that sticks out of their belly, flex a big muscle to bend their exoskeleton, and then open that latch to release the energy all at once. It’s almost the same way a crossbow or catapult works, only here, they’re using their flexible but strong exoskeleton as the spring. I’m not an engineer, but the fact that they have simple machines: latches, levers, and springs, built into their bodies, blows me away.
But… they aren’t the fastest either. These are trap-jaw ants, and although they don’t move their whole bodies, they can snap their jaws shut in less than a thousandth of a second, which is an acceleration of around 100,000 g’s… that’s more than the acceleration of a bullet leaving a gun. And they do it by using their entire head as a spring.
So even though these ants are accelerating their jaws really quickly, the force they’re generating on impact is tiny relative to us. That’s because their jaws don’t have that much mass. Basically, when this ant snaps against the tip of my finger, I can barely feel it. But organisms like these ants have evolved to meet challenges on their own physical scale. The jaws of this ant have evolved ultra-fast acceleration to catch prey. And the forces they generate might not seem like much to us, but to the ant, it’s enough for them to do incredible things. Like this one, using its jaw snap to escape from the pit of an antlion. By timing those snaps perfectly, trap-jaw ants can catapult themselves more than 40 centimeters away. That’d be like me flinging myself back more than 100 feet.
That ant was the animal acceleration record-holder until 2018, when it was dethroned by the snap-jaw, or Dracula ant, which snaps its jaws in 23 microseconds. That’s millionths of a second. Twenty times faster than the trap-jaw ant. Those mandibles go from 0 to 200 miles per hour in 0.000015 seconds. And it’s hard to believe, but the snap-jaw was recently knocked out of first place by a termite that can snap its jaw three times faster. And if you’re thinking this video looks a little unimpressive, that’s because when you’re filming at a ridiculous 460,000 frames per second, 128 x 128 pixels is the best that modern technology can offer.
What makes these tiny animals so impressive is that they’ve developed simple machines–latches and springs–thanks to nothing more than the power of evolution. And these latches and springs are the key to their record-setting speeds. If you’ve ever played paper football, you know it’s a lot easier to launch by flicking versus just swinging your finger. That’s because you’re using your fingers like a spring and latch, storing energy in your tendons and muscles and releasing it quickly, much faster than your muscles can move your finger alone. And when you snap? You’re doing what snap-jaw ants do when they push and slide their jaws past one another. But you do all these things way slower than the bugs do, because you’re a whole lot bigger and more massive.
How much acceleration can humans handle? In 1954, to test what pilots could endure after ejecting at high speeds, Air Force physician John Stapp shot to 623 miles per hour in five seconds on a rocket sled and slammed to a stop just one second later. He experienced a record-breaking 46.2 g’s, and for an instant, his 168-pound body weighed over 7,700 pounds. But remember that a froghopper can accelerate at 550 g’s, and the mandibles of the snap-jaw ants pull over 100,000 g’s… that’s insane.
They’re able to do that because they’re small. We are both subject to the same laws of physics, us large mammals and those tiny bugs. But those laws sometimes apply to us very differently: How we move through water, how hard or soft we fall, and how fast machines can carry us. It’s a good reminder that nature has figured out how to do things that we can still only dream of. Stay curious.
Speed – The distance an object travels per unit of time. – The car increased its speed to 60 kilometers per hour on the highway.
Acceleration – The rate at which an object’s velocity changes over time. – The roller coaster’s acceleration made the ride thrilling as it zoomed down the track.
Energy – The ability to do work or cause change, often measured in joules. – The sun provides energy to plants through the process of photosynthesis.
Inertia – The tendency of an object to resist changes in its state of motion. – Due to inertia, the book remained on the table even when the table was pushed slightly.
Mass – The amount of matter in an object, usually measured in kilograms or grams. – The mass of the basketball affects how much force is needed to throw it across the court.
Springs – Elastic objects that store mechanical energy when compressed or stretched. – The springs in the mattress help it return to its original shape after being pressed down.
Bugs – Informal term for insects, which are small arthropods with three body segments and six legs. – Scientists study bugs to understand their role in ecosystems and their impact on agriculture.
Evolution – The process by which different kinds of living organisms develop and diversify from earlier forms over generations. – The evolution of the giraffe’s long neck is thought to help it reach leaves high in trees.
Physics – The branch of science concerned with the nature and properties of matter and energy. – In physics class, we learned about the laws of motion and how they apply to everyday life.
Nature – The physical world and everything in it that is not made by humans. – Observing nature can teach us about the complex interactions between living organisms and their environments.
