Leaping Cockroach Gets Around on Spring-Loaded Knees
Baku, December 9 (AZERTAC). A recently discovered South African cockroach leaps through the air like a missile, traversing nearly 50 times its body length with every hop.
Called a leaproach, the insect only infrequently scuttles like a regular roach. The rest of the time it uses two powerful hind legs with spring-loaded knees to rocket above fields of sedge grass.
“Other cockroaches that live in the same environment haven`t bothered to evolve an ability to jump, but this small cockroach has quite literally made the leap,” said zoologist Mike Picker of the University of Cape Town, leader of a Dec. 6 Biology Letters study detailing the leaproach`s hopping mechanics.
“It has got an absolutely bizarre body design that evolved around a leaping form of locomotion,” he said.
About 4,000 species of cockroaches are known to science, and all but the leaproach scuttle on the ground. Picker and his colleague Jonathan Colville discovered the leaproach in 2006 as the insects hopped around a field of sedge grass in South Africa. It wasn`t until 2010, however, that the taxonomic world accepted the new species, named Saltoblattella montistabularis.
The new study reveals the leaproach uses its legs much like grasshoppers do, and yet — ounce for ounce — the leaproach far out-jumps locusts. While a grasshopper can jump up to 20 body lengths, a leaproach can sail forward 48 body lengths.
Other news in this section
