Why does grasshopper have Lance Armstrong's power?

Armed with strong, long legs, and as strong as Lance Armstrong, grasshoppers were born to fly and dance. A scientist recently gave 20 species to a dance competition and found them to be like hopscotchers.

Grasshoppers depend primarily on sprinted femur muscles for fast jumps and high jumps, and like humans, they must overcome resistance.

They use powerful single jumps to free themselves. The energy used for this is similar to the process of energizing people when sprinting - muscles are fed by oxygen-free processes (anaerobic). The result is a massive release of energy for muscles and lactic acid accumulation - chemicals that make muscles ache.

" Grasshopper muscle is the only type of invertebrate muscle that functions like a sprint in humans, " said Scott Kirkton of Union University in New York when he introduced his research.

However, if in terms of long jump, people are far less: their jump, relative to the body length, is equivalent to an average adult man who spans a distance of nearly 90 meters.

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Is this dance skill the result of size, or the leg operation? To find out, Kirkton measured the jump of 20 species of grasshoppers, weighing from 0.2 grams to 7 grams. He found that on average they all danced at the same distance - nearly 96 cm - regardless of body size.

According to the laws of biology, equal jumps also mean equal proportions of jumping / body mass.

But Kirkton found another result: smaller grasshoppers are more athletic than their big relatives."It turns out that small grasshoppers have more muscle, so they dance better," Kirkton said. In this first group, skeletal muscle accounted for 6% of body weight, compared with only 1% in the second group.

Smaller grasshoppers also have longer legs."If you have a long leg, you will have longer leverage to increase your strength," Kirkton said.

However, the advantages also bring disadvantages. Kirkton argued that smaller grasshoppers had to struggle with the stiffer air resistance than those with large bodies. For example, likewise, if an ant struggles to crawl through a small puddle, a puppy simply leaps over.

Kirkton hopes one day to use grasshoppers as a model to answer biomedical questions related to mechanical operation."This is the only insect we know that their muscles produce lactic during movement."

T. An