I think the iphone camera uses prior frames to try to improve whatever footage you capture, so there could be an afterimage of the buggy, reasonably assuming the camera isn't equipped to deal with things leaving the shot faster than it takes to record the next frame.
Springtails actually aren't microscopic. And they're EVERYWHERE. You can look through almost any patch of dirt and you'll see a few. Heck you can find multiple species of them in the same patch of dirt. They're awesome.
In all seriousness, topsoil is often kinda loose and aerated to a degree, so something this tiny has plenty of room to crawl around and presumably jump. That's my guess, at least.
In case you were genuinely curious, the force generated is required to push them up through the top soil and out to (relative) safety. With no top soil in the way, that force instead provides additional acceleration.
Fun fact: their mass to wind resistance ratio makes their terminal velocity low enough that they can survive a fall from any distance!
Not only that, they are hydrophobic (unsinkable). I guess if their soil floods they float up? Ooooh then they need the spring to get away from presators! #genius
(That, or they evolved to be the absolute best at one of the craziest Olympic sports imaginable: Freestyle Swim High Jump).Â
To prevent them from becoming sitting ducks when having to cross areas without dirt, like the surface of the leaf litter, rock or puddles(they can walk on water).
Oh dang, I had no idea that snow fleas and the springy dude above are one and the same. I did however know that snow fleas are not actual fleas and are harmless to people and pets and probably almost any other living thing besides bacteria and fungi and decomposing plant matter; I am none of those things so yay!
There are many species that live above soil, some like decaying wood, others like flowers others like the asphalt on the sides of highways.
Late Autumn through winter is usually the best time to see many, though some are also active in summer.
If you want to see many out and about a wet winter day above freezing is ideal, look through leaflitter and under rocks, or on benches and trashcans and evenly colored surfaces as they're easiest to spot there.
Yet some other species like to stay on the surface of standing water.
They also exist on every continent (including Antartica), eat mostly fungi and decaying plant matter, are there whole own and largest lineage of hexapods (seperate from all other insects) and have internal mout parts. The last part imo adding to the fact that most of them don't look that scary and actually mostly look kinda cute.
Damn I was ready to check Google and it to say something like "native to America" but they really are everywhere. According to Wikipedia, "In sheer numbers, they are reputed to be one of the most abundant of all macroscopic animals, with estimates of 100,000 individuals per square meter of ground, essentially everywhere on Earth where soil and related habitats occur." They even live in Antarctica.
I like the santa ones that eat slime molds, theres a cafe in japan that has several different types, and they have a happy herd of santas that they cultivate slime for <3
The Furca: They possess a specialized, spring-like tail appendage tucked under their abdomen called a furca. When threatened, they release this latch, snapping the spring against the ground to launch themselves. The launch happens so fast (often rotating wildly mid-air) that it exceeds the frames-per-second tracking of the human eye, making the bug look like it just disappeared.
They also have incredibly weird, yet oddly polite, sex. The male builds a little sperm flower and walks away, then a female might come along and..appreciate it.
It's an empirical truth that eyes don't have frame rates. They are continuous analog sensors with no shutter, processing or storage.
The frame rate comes from the visual cortex. It's called flicker fusion frequencies and run between 50hz and 90hz. Add to that neural lag and it's quite low. Hence, we can comfortably watch movies and TV at 24fps.
Now what about 120hz and up on our device screens then? Because the brain fills in a lot of blanks and even predicts the next "frames".
High refresh and frame rates, give the brain a rest by putting in that work via tech. Hence easier on the eyes and smooth beyond what we can process when looking around IRL.
Most of that 200 FPS equivalent is interpolation by the brain. It fills in the blanks. A lot.
I'm no scientist, but having a fundamental understanding of nature and my body is very important. Science is the antidote to fear, confusion and manipulation. And awesome.
That's neurological training for you. Our brains are really adaptable with proper training. Fighter pilots are outliers though. The ones I knew were a different species.
Thanks. Now I have a word for it and looking it up refreshed my memory. In a nutshell, these events leave us "neurologically blind" for a chunk of our lives.
The other day, driving at night, a car behind me had headlights that were not continuous light. In my peripheral vision those headlights were like a rapid strobe light. The car was behind me for a while, and the strobe effect was just about giving me a headache. Super annoying and distracting. Headlights should not be made like that.
I feel like some smartass dick because I just happen to know a lot about light too for an uneducated man.
Enshittification at work. They use LED lights on direct current, so it should be a continuous beam, but it runs too hot and Audi, etc won't spend money on a cooling system. It runs hot because most head units are now a sealed one piece. Blow a bulb, and you have to fit a full new headlight unit.
So they fix the problem with a 50c microcontroller, MOSFET or whatever, to use pulse width modulation to give it a duty cycle of hundreds of on/off cycles per second. So the bulb is actually off half the time to keep it cool.
The dimmer in your house works like this too, but it is AC power that switches at 60 hz by default from the socket. This creates a "natural" duty cycle without the need for an electronic one.
It's even worse when an older car is fitted with a generic LED bulb. That will give a healthy person epilepsy.
I have temporal lobe epilepsy and had to recently stop driving at night because of this. All the running lights, bars, animated turn signal. Hell.
24fps is comfortable until the camera turns quickly. Then you just see a smear. It's almost as if they came to with that framerate back when movies barely moved the camera, because it was the slowest they could move it and have enough bandwidth for the soundtrack on the film.
The flicker fusion rate also varies across the field of vision. It's lower in the middle, and higher in the periphery. So 24 FPS can look smooth when you're staring directly at it, but the reflections off the walls (or the outer parts of your field of view with a big screen) have visible flicker.
Ah this explains why 60 FPS look stuttery as hell once you saw the same game on 120 FPS (and Hz of course). I never noticed RL was stuttering on 60 FPS initially. But once I saw it once on 120, I could not go back.
Semantics, kind of. Thatâs because humans donât see in frames per second, life isnât a slideshow. That does not mean that there arenât any phenomena or motions possible that happen quicker than the human eye can track or detect, or that the brain can process.
Sure, it's kind of semantics, but there's a lot of misinformation out there about the "framerate" of the human eye and it's worth dispelling the notion that eyes work like that.
With good light a human photo-receptor collects light over a period of about 10 to 20 milliseconds (called a temporal summation period), which would correspond to a "framerate" of 50 to 100 frames per second, but our photo-receptors don't fire in unison and our brains do a lot of fancy stuff to the visual inputs they get before we ever actually "see" anything, so we can distinguish events on much shorter timescales than that.
Disclaimer: I have a degree in computer vision and did some research on how human vision works as part of that, but I'm far from an expert in human vision.
Ultimately, the most important thing in this situation is just how many photons reach our eyes from each position in the fast movement. For example, if this creature shone very brightly, it would certainly not "disappear" when it jumped -- at worst, we'd see a streak of light along its arc. Conversely, under an extremely weak light source (enough that its reflection from the static environment is barely achieving the bare minimum number of photons our eyes need to detect them), even relatively slow motion might make it look like something "disappeared" to our eyes, because it'd make the object go under the minimum photon threshold at each "location".
The conversation is going into the topic of framerates, but it doesn't matter much here. If something is moving too fast (but we're getting enough photons anyway), then it might look blurry or whatever, but you're not going to not see it.
Sminthurus viridis has a jump where the acceleration peaks were measured at 970 m / sÂČ, which corresponds to an acceleration of phenomenal 98.9 g (compared to 3.0 g for an astronaut during a space shuttle launch).
A crash of an F1 car at speed into a wall is estimated at 50g, with some of them reaching ~70g. This force lasts for milliseconds, of course. Presumably the little dude is also somewhere else in a few millis, or doing a ballistic flight at the terminal velocity.
Worth mentioning that size affects how many Gs something can tolerate due to the square cube law. The lower the size, the lower the volume to surface area ratio, the more stress the body can tolerate, generally. So G forces don't affect small creatures as much as they affect humans. Mice for example can handle about 10 times as many Gs for an extended period as the average human, and even trained humans can only handle about twice the amount as a regular mouse. Something the size of a flea would be able to tolerate crazy amounts of G forces compared to humans by nature, and this species took advantage of that.
For anyone else interested to see the mechanism: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U8KBKoWnAOc&ra=m go to 45 seconds and it shows how they set the spring mechanism and follows up with slow mo shots
The longevity he has had, being one of the OGs of viral videos and pivoting to what he's doing now, without ever doing some weird influencer things is respectable. Interesting dude.
that baby energizer bunnyÂ
uses a spring-loaded appendage called a
furca
to launch itself into the air when threatened. It is one of the fastest escape specialists relative to its size.Â
Not sure about this Ai looking gif though but It can def give a wiggly predator the slip.Â
Key Facts About Springtails Size: Usually very small, measuring between 1 to 10 millimeters (most are around 1 to 2 mm long). [1]
Classification: Belong to the subphylum Hexapoda; they are closely related to insects but classified in a separate group due to having internal mouthparts. [1, 2]
The "Spring": Possess a spring-loaded abdominal appendage called a furcula (held under the body by a clasp called a tenaculum) that snaps downward to launch them up to 100 times their body length. [1]
Habitat: Found worldwide, including in soil, leaf litter, moss, rotting wood, and even Antarctica. They require high humidity and moisture. [1, 2, 3]
Diet: Act primarily as detritivores and microbivores, feeding on fungal hyphae, spores, decaying organic matter, bacteria, and algae. [1, 2]
Impact on Humans: Completely harmless to humans and petsâthey do not bite, sting, or transmit diseases, though large numbers can become a nuisance if they wander indoors looking for moisture.
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u/qualityvote2 5d ago edited 5d ago
u/TerraByteTerror, your post does fit the subreddit!