Saad Bhamla
Appearances
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
Those are the flies saying, It's the slingshot spider as it flies through the air like a daredevil.
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
In fact, it has the fastest full-body motion of any arachnid. What a daredevil.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
And it kind of dawned on me that, forget other adults, no kid ever would go to currentbiology.org and actually download this and read this. And so there was this lingering feeling that there has to be a better way to share this beautiful discovery.
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
It's a tiny bug. They drink juices from plants, like their xylem fluid, and then they leave behind a gift, which is a bacteria called Xylella fastidiosa, which creates a lot of problems across the United States, from California for vines and then citrus from Florida. But it's a beautiful bug, and it drinks a lot, and it pees a lot.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
I was actually at my son's pre-K who's five-year-old and showing this and he loves it and all the kids love it because they've never seen pee. Like to me, this is the most beautiful pee in the world. It's like a perfect drop. So we used macro lenses that allow us to zoom in, effectively a microscope, but with a high-speed camera.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
I'm very promiscuous in my organisms, so nothing is off the table.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
And that's where we kind of focus in on the business end of this bug, which is the butt flicker like you shared. And yeah, it was so amazing for the first time to see how it flicks these droplets at such high speeds. It's just incredible.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
This was the whole conundrum. And my graduate student, Elio Chalita, who did this work, and he showed me this. I didn't believe it. And we checked again and again. And the kind of aha moment, which is these droplets are compressible. They deform and squishy because of surface tension. So they store energy by squishing it, just like if you had a Jell-O.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
Exactly, like a water balloon. So it can store energy by surface tension. And that was why we called it super propulsion, because it gets some energy for free by storing energy in the deformation or the squishiness of the drop.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
Precisely. It sticks to them. And so they have to give this flick.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
A neat example of this is in your smart watches or hearing aids. Smart watches, for example, have a button where after you go for a swim, you can press a button and it ejects the water to protect the electronics. We think we can learn a trick or two from the sharpshooter and improve the ability of these low-power electronics to eject water from tiny crevices and areas using very minimal energy.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
Oh no, you already had your comic. It's my turn, Sheriff Shop Shooter.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
They're peeing on each other. So they're both drinking xylem fluid. But the cicada, because it's larger, it doesn't need to conserve energy and doesn't have these butt flickers. So it, you know, loosely speaking, is similar to us or other mammals, different body structures, but it can make jets at this point.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
The Curious Zoo of Extraordinary Organisms, The Slingshot Spider.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
That would be interesting. I don't think they even made it on their radar. All right, got it. What is the feedback you've gotten on this? One email I got, this is during the pandemic a couple of years ago. This was around the time in Lebanon, there was the explosion and the economy was tanked and there was a lot of children who are now in refugee camps.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
And so an educator who was doing this for non-profit reached out and said, oh, I printed all your comics because many of these kids are now displaced and in refugee camps and we were having a hard time getting textbooks and teaching them. And so the comics reminded them about kind of living systems and biology were in... In certain situations, they might not encounter them.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
So they really were grateful and appreciated and made my heart kind of warm.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
I'll tell you a recent story. In December, after Christmas break, we were out camping in the middle of nowhere in Georgia at the state park, Magnolia Springs State Park. And so I met this... local Georgian woman. She lives in a farm nearby and enjoys. And she said, well, what do you do? And I explained, I'm a scientist and I study bugs. And she says, why? I said, I really love animals.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
And we were able to connect because she said, I'll tell you this, but don't report me into animal control. And I said, why? Why would I do that? She says, I love possums. And I have three possums in my house. They're just like my pets. And this is a person that I would never encounter in Atlanta, Georgia, right? This is rural Georgia, middle of nowhere.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
But we are still able to connect over our shared love of animals. And I think sometimes it takes stepping out of these ivory towers that scientists put themselves in, writing these fancy journals. that really exclude taxpayers, my neighbors who pay for this. So kind of that's, I think a little bit onus is on us is to step out of our comfort zone and not underestimate the average American.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
I think they're resilient, curious, and perhaps sometimes we hold ourselves back.
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All Hail The Butt Flicker
First, the spider grips the silk line of its web with its pedipalps and front legs. a portion of the web is bundled into a tight coil. A coil so tight, the web takes the shape of a cone. And when the spider senses a hapless flying insect, it releases the line with its front legs and flings itself and the web backwards to snack its prey.