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The insects use snap-buckling, a basic principle of mechanical engineering.

Click beetles have the capacity to propel themselves more than 20 times their own height into the air without using their legs.

A group of researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana released a paper on the physical mechanisms that allow the beetles' signature clicking maneuver in a study that has potential applications for machines built using the principles of biomimicry.

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Studying the immense jumping power of click beetles

The new study examines the forces behind the super-fast energy release that allows click beetles to jump to such great heights. In doing so, it also provides guidelines for studying extreme motion, energy storage, and energy release in small insects and animals.

Incredibly, click beetles use a unique hingelike tool in their thorax, just behind the head, to jump into the air.

To determine how this mechanism works the team used high-speed X-rays. These allowed them to observe and quantify how the click beetle's external and internal anatomy - including muscle, other soft structures, and the insect's rigid exoskeleton - moves throughout the jumping process.

"The hinge mechanism has a peg on one side that stays latched onto a lip on the other side of the hinge," entomology professor Marianne Alleyne, who was part of the research team, explained in a press release.

"When the latch is released, there is an audible clicking sound and a quick unbending motion that causes the beetle's jump," she continued.

Faster than Earth's gravitational acceleration

The researchers observed large, yet relatively slow deformations in the soft tissue parts of the beetles' hinge in the lead-up to the jumping motion.

"When the peg in the hinge slips over the lip, the deformation in the soft tissue is released extremely quickly, and the peg oscillates back and forth in the cavity below the lip before coming to a stop," mechanical science and engineering professor Aimy Wissa, who was also part of the study, explained.

"The fast deformation release and repeated, yet decreasing, oscillations showcase two basic engineering principles called elastic recoil and damping," she continued.

As the researchers point out, the acceleration of this motion is a staggering 300 times more than that of the Earth's gravitational acceleration - a lot of energy coming from a tiny insect.

"Surprisingly, the beetle can repeat this clicking maneuver without sustaining any significant physical damage," said mechanical science and engineering professorAlison Dunn, also on the research team.

"That pushed us to focus on figuring out what the beetles use for energy storage, release, and dissipation," she continued.

Cross-pollination between fields of engineering, biology

As the lead author of the study, Ophelia Bolmin, points out, "we discovered that the insect uses a phenomenon called snap-buckling - a basic principle of mechanical engineering - to release elastic energy extremely quickly. It is the same principle that you find in jumping popper toys."

Wissa says that "if an engineer wanted to build a device that jumps like a click beetle, they would likely design it the same way nature did. This work turned out to be a great example of how engineering can learn from nature and how nature demonstrates physics and engineering principles."

The study was part of an interdisciplinary collaboration between engineering and biology which re-emphasized how much the engineering world can learn from nature.

"These results are fascinating from an engineering perspective, and for biologists, this work gives us a new perspective on how and why click beetles evolved this way," Alleyne said. "This kind of insight may have never come to light, if not for this interdisciplinary collaboration between engineering and biology. It opens a new door for both fields."

The new research adds to the growing field of biomimicry, leading to potential advances in the likes of exoskeletons, bionic eyes, and jumping robots.

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Chris Young is a journalist, copywriter, blogger and tech geek at heart who's reported on the likes of the Mobile World Congress, written for Lifehack, The Culture Trip, Flydoscope and some of the world's biggest tech companies, including NEC and Thales, about robots, satellites and other world-changing innovations.

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Scientists Study Incredible Energy of Click Beetles' Jump Motion

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The insects use snap-buckling, a basic principle of mechanical engineering.

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arthropod: Any of numerous invertebrate animals of the phylum Arthropoda, including the insects, crustaceans, arachnids and myriapods. Adults feature an exoskeleton made of a hard material called chitin and a segmented body to which jointed appendages are attached in pairs.

average: (in science) A term for the arithmetic mean, which is the sum of a group of numbers that is then divided by the size of the group.

biology: The study of living things. The scientists who study them are known as biologists.

biomechanist: Someone who studies how living things move, especially the forces exerted by muscles and gravity on the skeletal structure.

footage: (in movies and videos) A term for the uncut or unprocessed motion pictures or video imagery taken by a camera. It takes its name from the fact that it took several feet of film to capture a few seconds of motion-picture photography.

literally: An adjective indicating that the phrase it modifies is precisely true. For instance, to say: " It's so cold that I'm literally dying," means that this person actually expects to soon be dead, the result of getting too cold.

predator: (adjective: predatory) A creature that preys on other animals for most or all of its food.

rainforest: Dense forest rich in biodiversity found in tropical areas with consistent heavy rainfall.

springtails: An order (Collembola) of more than 8,000 tiny six-legged wingless animals that live in soils around the world. They're known for their high-jumping lifestyle, flinging themselves in the air through use of a forked and springy tail-like feature known as a furcula. Once considered insects, these hexapods no longer are for a host of reasons, including how their mouthparts attach to their bodies.

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Horseshoe crabs have existed for more than 400 million years, surviving dinosaurs, ice ages, and rearrangement of the continents. Today, this ancient animal has both ecological and economical important in South Carolina. Its eggs serve as a vital source of food for migrating birds and extracts from its blood are used extensively in the biomedical industry.