Beetle outjumps flea to claim world record

The Flea, scourge of pets and damned by their owners, could at least claim to be the world's greatest jumper. Now even that accolade looks doomed.

A beetle that spends much of its life encased in "cuckoo spit" has taken its title. The spittle bug, or froghopper, outperforms the flea in the high jump, a Cambridge University scientist has found.

Using a high-speed video camera, Malcolm Burrows, an entomologist in the zoology department, found that the six-millimetre-long insect can leap to heights of 70cm (28ins), equivalent to a human hurdling a 210-metre skyscraper.

"Fleas are considered to be the champion jumpers, but here I show that froghoppers are in fact the real champions and that they achieve their supremacy by using a novel catapault mechanism for jumping," Dr Burrows writes in the journal Nature.

There are two ways of leaping. Kangaroos and other long-legged creatures use the leverage of their limbs, whereas the short-legged flea uses the sudden release of pent-up energy to accelerate. Dr Burrows found that the froghopper uses a similar catapault mechanism to accelerate to speeds up to 4,000 metres per second.

Froghoppers exert a force more than 400 times their body weight, compared to a flea's jumping force of 135 times its body weight. A good human jumper exerts a force of about three times body weight.