These bugs suck up their meals with an impressive amount of suction, and pee a lot to compensate. Froghoppers suction up their meals and pee them out at incredibly impressive rates.
that even if the insects “were on the top of the Statue of Liberty’s torch, they could have a straw going all the way down to the ground going into a glass of water, and they could be quite happily sucking it up.”
Froghoppers work immensely hard for their supper. The suctioning is not only incredibly labor intensive, but the xylem is so devoid of nutrition that they have to sip large amounts to sustain their tiny bodies—100 to 1000 times their own body weight in sap a day. Sometimes they’ll consume fluid for 24 hours straight.
All that sipping results in a whole lot of peeing. Froghoppers excrete so much fluid that they could probably drown themselves, which is why they’ve also developed another anatomical anomaly: a butt catapult that flicks pee drops safely out of reach from their bodies, two to four inches away. Though their process of feeding is laborious, froghoppers’ efforts pay off, even when feeding from the most difficult of plants. The team of scientists looked at how the bugs might fare with fluids of varying viscosities and pressures, and they seemed to do just fine.Hannah is a freelance science journalist, podcast writer, and poet based in Brooklyn. In addition to
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