LAS VEGAS — Some species of parasitic roundworms can catapult themselves excessive into the air to latch onto fruit flies and different bugs. Experiments now reveal that leaping Steinernema carpocapsae nematodes benefit from a secret weapon that makes them notably efficient of their pursuit of victims: static electrical energy.
Flying bugs build up electric charge as they transfer by means of the air (SN: 10/31/22). It’s the identical impact that causes electrical energy to gather on droplets of mist in clouds, and in the end results in lightning.
Particular person bugs can accumulate expenses of 100 volts or so, biomechanics researcher Víctor Ortega Jiménez of the College of Maine in Orono reported March 6 on the American Bodily Society assembly. When nematodes leap, the charge on a passing insect attracts the parasites like lint to a staticky sweater.
To check the impact of electrical cost, Ortega Jiménez and colleagues mounted lifeless fruit flies on wires and positioned them close to a floor lined in nematodes. With no cost on a fly, solely nematodes that occurred to leap within the route of the insect landed on the right track, as anticipated. When researchers utilized an electrical cost to a suspended fruit fly, even nematodes that originally headed within the mistaken route have been caught up within the electrical discipline and pulled onto the fly.
Ortega Jiménez has additionally studied electrical pressure results on spider webs. When charged bugs neared an online, “the silk is attracted on to the bugs,” he says. That made him wonder if leaping nematodes depend on these forces as properly.
Researchers have lengthy thought-about the impact of fluids and air circulate on bugs and different tiny creatures. However solely just lately have they added electrical energy to the combination, Ortega Jiménez says. “We have to know the way animals truly are coping with these forces at this scale.”