Entomologists, who study insects, need to be looking for them more than most of us.
Adrian Smith, an entomologist from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, told ScienceAlert that his colleague noticed a dead tree in the middle of the university campus.
If you're an entomologist, peeling off the bark of a tree with that condition is always worth it.
The researchers were able to discover that a species of beetle has a way of jumping that no one had documented before.
In the image below, you can see that the tiny larvae tighten their bodies before exploding into the air. The larvae travel on average two body lengths horizontally and 1.5 body lengths vertically. It's a sight to behold.
The larva is holding and jumping. Bertone et al., a journal.
The way these larvae were jumping was impressive at first, but we didn't immediately understand how unique it was.
We shared it with a number of beetle experts around the country, and none of them had seen the jumping behavior before. We needed to take a closer look at how the larva was doing.
The 'explosion' is powered by that latch releasing mechanism that most beetles and jumping insects use. You can see this type of biological mechanism in action in the spring loaded punch of a mantis shrimp.
The researchers weren't able to find a latch, but they did give it a red-hot go. They used cameras that could capture 60,000 frames a second, as well as MicroCT scans and scanning electron microscopes to look over the whole body, but nothing could be found.
The team looked at the larva's body composition to see if they could jump that high using their muscles. The tiny creature didn't have enough strength to pull it off.
"We know that they are storing energy, but where is a different question," says Smith.
It's like a cascade when the little beetle claws lose grip of the ground.
The researchers have shown that when the larvae lose their footing on one of their legs, their head can curl inwards and propel them into their jump. Smith's video shows the beautiful jump.
Living in a temporary home under the bark of a dead tree means you need to be able to leave quickly.
Smith says it might be to escape predators and then to scatter themselves.
We haven't seen them since I worked on it more.
The tree is no longer on the North Carolina State University campus. The researchers only had a short time to collect bugs before the tree ended up in the wood chipper.
All is not lost. Smith put up a different video on his channel about jumping maggots, but he didn't mention the jumping larvae. A researcher in Japan named Takahiro Yoshida saw the video and realized that he had seen another type of beetle jumping in his area.
The second beetle is in the same family but different from the first.
He filmed them with his cell phone because he noticed they were jumping fast. He probably didn't think much about it until he saw that video and he was like, "I know exactly what that is." Smith says that he has a cool thing and should email the people immediately.
It's probably a widespread behavior in this group of animals that wasn't known before.
Maybe we should be spending more time looking under bark. You could even get lucky and have a beetle jump at you.
The research has been published.
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