Smart move
Cicadas shoot urine droplets around – every second
Some cicadas hurl small droplets of urine around at short intervals. In doing so, they kill two birds with one stone.
published
The digestive system of certain leafhoppers is quite efficient—and a clever move of nature.
Nature Communications: M. Saad Bhamla et a. (2023)
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Leafhoppers excrete 300 percent of their body weight as urine droplets every day.
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But they don’t just drop them: they throw them far away.
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They do it for good reason, according to a new study.
Certain leafhoppers have an immense throughput of feed. Day after day, they eject around 300 times their body weight in small droplets of urine from their rear end. This is made possible by a kind of specialized device, as researchers led by Saad Bhamla from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the specialist magazine «Nature Communications» write. The researchers’ videos show how the little animals shoot small droplets almost every second.
For comparison: According to the researchers, the daily amount of excrement in humans corresponds to an average of only about 2.5 percent of their body weight.
Trick to save energy
According to the researchers, the cicadas (Homalodisca vitripennis), which are only a few millimeters in size, feed exclusively on so-called xylem juice, which is very poor in nutrients and consists almost exclusively of water. The animals have to absorb correspondingly large amounts of the plant sap. You have a efficient digestive system, which can filter large amounts of plant secretions and transport them through the body. In order to then get rid of the water, these cicadas use a special mechanism that particularly accelerates the excreted droplets, as the researchers write.
The whole thing is probably a strategy for the cicadas to save energy, because the energy consumption is significantly higher with other methods, write the researchers, who used numerous mathematical models for their study, among other things. By throwing the excrement far away, keep enemies at bay. Because the droplets landed somewhere, potential attackers would not be so aware of the whereabouts of the cicadas.
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(fee/dpa)