Everyone pees and just about everything. It turns out that some things do just that by pushing the fluid away from her back at an extremely high speed with an anal pen.
This unusual scenario sums up the work of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology on how a leaf-jumping insect called the glass-winged sharpshooter rests. Although it may seem esoteric, what they discovered could one day provide technological advancements like quickly getting water out of sensitive electronics.
The investigation of the sniper secretion process began the way many scientific excursions begin: pure curiosity. Saad Bahmleh, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, observed that an insect would repeatedly form a perfectly round droplet of liquid on its tail and then shoot it away at a blurring speed.
“Little is known about the fluid dynamics of secretion, despite its influence on the morphology, energy, and behavior of animals,” Bhamla said in the current situation. “We wanted to see if this little insect came up with any clever engineering or physics innovations in order to urinate in this way.”
Studying the insect with high-speed video and microscopes revealed that the slinger possesses a specific part that enables its impressive urination performance: an anal pen that Bhamla called a “butt flasher”.
Bhamla compares this feature to the flippers on a pinball machine that a sniper uses to shoot drops of urine at an incredible speed. Flash can accelerate liquid more than 10 times the speed of supercars.
“We realized that this insect had actually evolved a spring and a lever like a catapult, and that it could use those tools to repeatedly hurl drops of urine at great acceleration,” explained Elio Shalita, a graduate student in bioengineering who worked with Bhamla.
Team search is Published in this week’s issue of Nature Communications.
When the researchers recorded the speed of the streaming droplets, they noticed that the droplets of urine moved through the air faster than the flick of the fly that released it. This indicates the presence of superthrust, a phenomenon that has not yet been observed in natural systems.
Hyperthrust occurs when an elastic projectile obtains an energy boost by synchronizing pressure and firing timing. One way to visualize this is to imagine a diver launching off a springboard at just the right moment to get the maximum boost from the spring’s impact. The sniper pen appears to do something similar by compressing the droplet before launching, storing additional energy via surface tension in the liquid which then gives it a speed boost when pressed.
Researchers believe that the urination flick is the most efficient way for cannibals to process the massive amount of plant sap they drink each day to survive – up to 300 times their body weight.
Impulsive urination helps and helps you
Research into the pigeon habits of shooters could have some direct benefits for humans because the insect is a major pest causing millions of dollars in damage to crops, especially in vineyards and citrus fruits in California and Florida. Species are expected to spread as the climate changes, and this new finding may make it easier to track the spread of species and inform insights that help control their reproduction.
However, engineers may also learn from sniper biology and develop new systems for removing water from wearable electronic devices.
said Miriam Ashley Ross, director of programs at the US National Science Foundation, which partially funded the work. “The efficient method these tiny insects have developed to solve the problem may lead to bio-inspired solutions for solvent removal in small manufacturing applications such as electronics or for rapid removal of water from structurally complex surfaces.”
It’s crazy things we can discover from taking just a second to contemplate a drop of insect urine.
“This work reinforces the idea that curiosity-driven science has value,” Schlita said. “And the fact that we’ve discovered something so intriguing—the supercharged propulsion of droplets in a biological system and heroic feats of physics that have applications in other fields—makes it even more amazing.”
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