Waterlily beetles (Galerucella nymphaeae) water-ski at up to 0.5 meters per second. That’s equivalent to a human moving at 500 kilometers per hour.
Manu Prakash and Haripriya Mukundarajan
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Waterlily beetles (Galerucella nymphaeae) literally fly across water, high speed videography and a bit of mathematical modeling reveals.
The beetles have a combination of hydrophobic hairs that line their legs and hydrophilic claws that grip the surface of water without getting too wet. Prior to “take off,” the insects lift their middle pair of legs. Then, the insects beat their wings extremely fast and fly horizontally across a pool of water. It looks a lot like water-skiing.
In lab tests, waterlily beetles reached 0.5 meters per second — without an active brake system. Surface tension keeps the insects afloat, they found. When traveling at high enough speeds (at least 0.23 meters per second), the insects create ripples in the water, which generates drag (more than when the beetles just fly through air). Thus, for these beetles, skiing across a pond at breakneck speeds costs a lot of energy and requires greater wing thrust than normal flying. However, this mode of getting around could be more advantageous for foraging and help them avoid underwater predators like fish, the researchers speculate March 2 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
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SPLISH SPLASH Watch a waterlily beetle fly or “ski” across a water surface in the lab. Manu Prakash and Haripriya Mukundarajan< |
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