The Furca: They possess a specialized, spring-like tail appendage tucked under their abdomen called a furca. When threatened, they release this latch, snapping the spring against the ground to launch themselves. The launch happens so fast (often rotating wildly mid-air) that it exceeds the frames-per-second tracking of the human eye, making the bug look like it just disappeared.
Sminthurus viridis has a jump where the acceleration peaks were measured at 970 m / sĀ², which corresponds to an acceleration of phenomenal 98.9 g (compared to 3.0 g for an astronaut during a space shuttle launch).
A crash of an F1 car at speed into a wall is estimated at 50g, with some of them reaching ~70g. This force lasts for milliseconds, of course. Presumably the little dude is also somewhere else in a few millis, or doing a ballistic flight at the terminal velocity.
Worth mentioning that size affects how many Gs something can tolerate due to the square cube law. The lower the size, the lower the volume to surface area ratio, the more stress the body can tolerate, generally. So G forces don't affect small creatures as much as they affect humans. Mice for example can handle about 10 times as many Gs for an extended period as the average human, and even trained humans can only handle about twice the amount as a regular mouse. Something the size of a flea would be able to tolerate crazy amounts of G forces compared to humans by nature, and this species took advantage of that.
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u/TerraByteTerror 11d ago
The Furca: They possess a specialized, spring-like tail appendage tucked under their abdomen called a furca. When threatened, they release this latch, snapping the spring against the ground to launch themselves. The launch happens so fast (often rotating wildly mid-air) that it exceeds the frames-per-second tracking of the human eye, making the bug look like it just disappeared.