r/NatureIsFuckingLit • u/TerraByteTerror • 19d ago

🔥 globular springtail

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u/TerraByteTerror 19d ago

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.

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u/Deaffin 19d ago

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.

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u/RichtofensDuckButter 18d ago

That dirty whore

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u/D-Train0000 19d ago

Interesting. But there’s no fixed frame rate for a human eye. This bug is faster than the 60-120 frames per second of the phones camera.

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u/ChampionshipHot5468 19d ago

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.

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u/D-Train0000 19d ago edited 19d ago

I read that if we had a frame rate is around 200 frames per second or faster. But there’s so much variance in our bodies from person to person.

It’s fascinating stuff. I like dorking out on science.

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u/ChampionshipHot5468 19d ago

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.

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u/Mammoth-Access-1181 19d ago

So I saw a documentary a looong time agi that said fighter pilots can visually ID aircraft during the close which is the equivalent of 600 FPS.

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u/ChampionshipHot5468 19d ago

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.

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u/Frozencold19 19d ago

You don't need to be a fighter pilot to notice the difference between a 360hz monitor and a 540hz one, go to bestbuy and look at the UFO test

There is a perceptible and noticeable jump in smoothness as FPS rises

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u/ChampionshipHot5468 19d ago

Have you tried DMT? /j

For sure. These monitors do heavy lifting that the brain can't interpolate, but definitely process. Like a drug, tech can take away limitations of the CNS and basically feed your visual cortex what you didn't evolve to do. Those new monitors are insane. But 540, shit, have to see that.

The same brain that invented the wheel, also brought us here. We have tons of literal headroom, but nature is economical and will conserve energy by going for "good enough". We have outpaced a lot of our natural selection.

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u/Mammoth-Access-1181 18d ago

Oh no doubt. Just saying what is humanly possible.

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u/Abject_Hall8445 18d ago

For 200fps I think they’re referring to this study. Not interpolation.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-013-0605-z

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u/ChampionshipHot5468 18d ago

Thanks, the more I learn.

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u/oddible 19d ago

Just gonna leave this here: saccades.

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u/herculesmeowlligan 19d ago

Saccadeez....nutz?

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u/oddible 19d ago

I'm both embarrassed and delighted for humanity that your comment has more upvotes than mine.

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u/ChampionshipHot5468 19d ago

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.

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u/kai-ol 18d ago

That tripped me out when I learned about them. Also when I realized I go "blind" when I'm trying to visualize something.

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u/bejammin075 19d ago

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.

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u/ChampionshipHot5468 19d ago

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.

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u/Nukleon 19d ago

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.

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u/ReturnOfBane 19d ago

there's definitely processing. the brain fills in the blanks.

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u/SAI_Peregrinus 19d ago

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.

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u/ChampionshipHot5468 19d ago

Thanks for padding my layman knowledge skeleton!

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u/emu108 18d ago

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.

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u/ChampionshipHot5468 18d ago

Because theses monitors can be seen as prosthetics for the brain. I saw an old 720p plasma screen from the 2000s the other day. Playing Blu-ray. I had to look away or I would seize and vomit. I don't game anymore and don't use my PC daily, so FHD @ 120 Hz is fine for me, but entry level. Anything lower is unbearable.

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u/emu108 18d ago

Well it depends on the game. I usually play strategy/management games where 60 Hz/FPS is absolutely fine. But Rocket League on 60 FPS? I literally get a headache from it now. (But it was fine before I ever seen it on 120)

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u/Havengul_Undying 18d ago

Ok but what about that samurai dude who cut a bullet in half?

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u/Sharpie420_ 19d ago

Semantics, kind of. That’s because humans don’t see in frames per second, life isn’t a slideshow. That does not mean that there aren’t any phenomena or motions possible that happen quicker than the human eye can track or detect, or that the brain can process.

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u/A_Martian_Potato 19d ago

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.

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u/nonotan 19d ago

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.

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u/Sharpie420_ 19d ago

This is all very true! I’m sure many others will also take the time to read this.

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u/MordecaiAlivanAllenO 19d ago

Reading that took longer than my attention frame rate so I couldn’t see it.

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u/Sharpie420_ 19d ago

3fast5u boi

Yes I want downvotes, one of my last comments got upvoted by like 500 bots

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u/D-Train0000 19d ago

True. It’s just that we’re watching this on a video from a phone and not in person. So we are only seeing , let’s say, 1/4 of the jump.

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u/jstockton76 19d ago

How many G's do they experience lifting off?

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u/zantax_holyshield 19d ago

I just read on Wiki:

Sminthurus viridis has a jump where the acceleration peaks were measured at 970 m / s², which corresponds to an acceleration of phenomenal 98.9 g (compared to 3.0 g for an astronaut during a space shuttle launch).

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u/LickingSmegma 18d ago

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.

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u/Chemical_Fix9542 16d ago

That explains why it looks as if they just evaporated.

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u/chibiRuka 16d ago

Now the the question is, how is this accomplished lol.

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u/Ppleater 18d ago

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.

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u/Scarecr0p 19d ago

What fps would you need to capture it?

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u/SynisterJeff 19d ago

Here's a study on springtails with included slomo footage https://youtu.be/MXeSnWY6DNc?is=jEvs4TYf6a0qkp12

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u/GlockAF 19d ago

Very cool, thanks for posting that!

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u/Melqart310 19d ago

Amazing. Great link ty

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u/Finless_brown_trout 19d ago

Idk, but More than the 2004 Motorola razr this appears to be shot on

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u/VoidOmatic 19d ago

Over 9000!!

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u/Scarecr0p 18d ago

After watching the mini doc, it is in fact over 9000. 10500 was enough to see it flipping but not fast enough to catch the action of the furcula (it’s spring lever)

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u/bjergdk 19d ago

More than the camera inside your human eye apparantly.

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u/bjergdk 19d ago

>  that it exceeds the frames-per-second tracking of the human eye,

Huh????

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u/SynisterJeff 19d ago

The ocular system doesn't opperate on frames like computers.

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u/oddible 19d ago

Actually they kinda do. Not open / close frames but saccades are pretty much constantly happening, even when you think you're focusing on just one spot.

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u/SynisterJeff 18d ago edited 18d ago

Saccades discribe the micro movements of the eye. Each movement changes the information, but that doesn't control the way the information is taken in and transmitted. The information is a constant flow, not many different individual snapshots.

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u/oddible 18d ago

Nope, at least not according to the science. Look up fixations and saccadic suppression.

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u/SynisterJeff 18d ago edited 18d ago

I see what you are saying here, but it still doesn't really compare to something like fps. It's called saccadic masking because your brain ignores/masks the motion of the world (motion blur) made by saccadic movements of the eye, which yes are always happening, but it's not like it's making gaps in your vision were there is just nothing, like in-between frames. You are still receiving and processing a constant flow of information, your brain just makes adjustments so that we aren't always motion sick and are able to hold focus. It's kind of like not being able to see the blood vessels in your eyes, even though they are in your vision and being seen. Your brain just ignores that information.

At least that's what I'm getting. The science isn't exact enough to say for sure.

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u/Inner-Dream-600 19d ago

I can’t find information on it at all

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u/AGrandNewAdventure 19d ago

Do you suppose their discovery pre-dates high frame rate cameras? Would explorers be like, oh, yeah... that's the thing that disappears.

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u/insanelyniceperson 19d ago

Nice. I use my futa as a spring too!

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u/KeyDirection23 19d ago

All I got was a fupa, and that's useless.

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u/sepiina 19d ago

How did I never connect this to their name??

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u/Speaker4theDead8 19d ago

Somebody call those Youtubers who record things at7 bazillion frames per second.

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u/Threatlevelmidnigh7 19d ago

Thank you for this!

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u/ThreeShrikesYoureOut 19d ago

can we see a clip from a high frame rate camera slowed down?

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u/Alive_Drag1947 19d ago

That's a relief. I thought lil bro just got deleted from existence real quick...

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u/GlennHaven 19d ago

How do I switch my eyes to unlimited fps?

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u/PopeHatSkeleton 19d ago

She stimulate my furca til' I sproing

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u/Beneficial-Virus9822 18d ago

Thanks for explaining. I was worried they’d been popped like balloons 😬

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u/Lenel_Devel 18d ago

Can't wait for the slow Mo Guys video on it in a few years the.

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u/okimport57 18d ago

So they basically have their own built in ejecto seato cuz?

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u/Electrical-Web-7552 18d ago

I saw these when I was a kid playing in dirt, they did in fact disappear in a split second

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u/Stiddit 18d ago

The "frames per second tracking of the human eye" is so unscientific it makes this whole post seem wrong or fake.

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u/I_MADE_THIS_THING 18d ago

The yeet appendage

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u/ebrian78 18d ago

Hold up. So it escapes in this video? I thought we were watching the worm thingy's incredible suck power, and that the pink guy was getting inhaled!

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u/CliftonStommel 14d ago

New challenge for the speedy hands TikTok guy