Study: Cicadas urinate in streams, not drops. Here’s why that’s a little strange. | Top Vip News

Cicadas may be just a few centimeters long, but they eat so much that they have to urinate frequently and emit streams of urine, according to a study. new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This is unusual, as similar insects are known to form more energy-efficient urine droplets rather than streams. Even adult cicadas have been known to spray intruders with their anal jets, a thought that will no doubt stay with us when “Double Breeding” Cicada Season starts in earnest this spring.

The scientific community has shown a lot of interest in the fluid dynamics of sucking insects, but not so much in how they remove waste, according to Saad Bhamla of Georgia Tech (although Leonardo da Vinci was fascinated by the behavior of the jets and the role of cohesion of fluids in droplets). training). However, this is a critical function for the ecological and metabolic regulation of any organism. So Bhamla’s research has focused on addressing that deficiency and challenging what he believes are outdated, mammalian-centric paradigms that supposedly govern waste disposal in various creatures.

For example, last year, his team studied urination in the glassy winged sniper. The sniper drinks large amounts of water and pierces the plant. xylem (which transports water from the roots to the stems and leaves) to suck the sap. Therefore, snipers urinate frequently, expelling up to 300 times their own body weight in urine each day. Instead of producing a constant stream of urine, snipers form droplets of urine in their anus and then catapult them out of their bodies at remarkable speeds, with accelerations 10 times faster than a Lamborghini.

They found that The insect uses this unusual “superpropulsion” mechanism to conserve energy. They compared the sniper’s use of his anal pen to a diver jumping off a high diving board. The authors’ models showed that using this superpropulsion mechanism requires four to eight times less energy than simply producing a stream of urine. As an added bonus, throwing their urine droplets further makes snipers less likely to be chemically detected by predators such as parasitic wasps.

The sniper is also not the only type of insect that employs this type of excretion strategy; Nature has many “poop pullers”, “butt pullers” and “poop throwers”. For example, skipper larvae have latches on their anal plates and can raise their blood pressure to expel solid pellets, while some night The species (moth family) kick the granules with their thoracic legs. But the glassy-winged sniper study was the first time superpropulsion was observed in a living organism.