The secret behind the flea’s extraordinary jump was discovered in 1967 when Henry Bennet-Clark realised that the tiny athlete was launched by a spring, not muscle. Later, he found that locusts use similar systems to project themselves into the air, but the mechanical details remained obscure until Malcolm Burrows focused a high-speed camera on the left leg of a locust.
Using lower resolution 1970s technology, Bennet-Clark had shown that some of the energy that goes into the locust’s kick is stored in the external cuticle and a tendon. A couple of shield-like structures in the hinge joint, called the semi-lunar processes, also store energy, but how that energy was released into the kick wasn’t clear.
Filming jumping locusts isn’t easy, but if you hold them on their backs and tickle their feet, you can get some pretty vigorous kicks out of them. Genevieve Morris filmed the hinge joint moving, at...
