A tiny worm that leaps high into the air — up to 25 times its body length — to attach to flying insects uses static electricity to perform this astounding feat, scientists have found. The journal PNAS published the work on the nematode Steinernema carpocapsae, a parasitic roundworm, led by researchers at Emory University (Justin Burton and Ranjiangshang Ran, right) and the University of California, Berkeley (Víctor Ortega Jiménez, left). The work was recently featured in the New York Times.
The researchers showed how a charge of a few hundred volts, similar to that generated by an insect’s wings beating the air, initiates an opposite charge in the worm, creating an attractive force. They identified electrostatic induction as the charging mechanism driving this process.
“Using physics, we learned something new and interesting about an adaptive strategy in an organism,” says Ranjiangshang Ran, co-lead author of the paper and a postdoctoral fellow in Burton’s lab. “We’re helping to pioneer the emerging field of electrostatic ecology.”
Co-authors include Saad Bhamla and Sunny Kumar, who study biomechanics across species at Georgia Institute of Technology, where Ortega-Jiménez performed preliminary experiments; and Adler Dillman, a nematode biologist at the University of California, Riverside.
For a complete story, Emory’s Carol Clark wrote up detailed account in Emory News.