National Geographic

This Insect Has Gears In Its Legs

The image above is an extreme close-up of a common British insect called a planthopper. You’re looking at it from below, at the point where its two hind legs connect to its body. In the middle, you can clearly see that the top of each leg has a row of small teeth, which interlock together. As the planthopper jumps, the teeth ensure that its legs rotate together and extend at the same time.

This insect has gears.


It’s a steampunk bug!

The gears are found on many young planthoppers but Gregory Sutton from the University of Cambridge first discovered them on a common British species called Issus coeleoptratus. “We didn’t have to go to some obscure monastery in Outer Slaubvinia to find these things,” he says. “We had to go to a place called The Garden, in The Backyard. Either the most complicated gearing in nature happens to be in our backyard, or there is stuff that’s vastly more intricate and complicated that hasn’t been found yet.”

A baby Issus coleoptratus. Credit: Malcolm Burrows

A baby Issus coleoptratus. Credit: Malcolm Burrows

Sutton has been working with Malcolm Burrows from the University of Cambridge for the last 10 years, to study the movements of jumping insects like fleas, locusts, leafhoppers and pygmy mole crickets. When they filmed young planthoppers taking off, they saw that the hind legs would always move within 30 microseconds (millionths of a second) of each other. Such extreme coordination makes sense—the slightest difference in timing would send the insects spinning off to the side. But how could they achieve such tightly synchronised movements?

The nervous system can’t be involved. In 30 microseconds, a neuron can barely begin to fire, much less trigger something that tweaks the insect’s movements.

The answer lies on the insect’s undersides. Back in the 1950s, other scientists noted that young planthoppers have small bumps on their trochanters—the first segment of the legs, which connect to the hip-like coxa. They were only found on the hind legs, and not the other pairs. No one knew what they were for. No one seemed to care. “It was one of those odd little footnotes in anatomical books,” says Sutton.

Burrows and Sutton discovered the function of the bumps by planthoppers that had been restrained on their backs. The insects would try to jump whenever the duo gently prodded their abdomens. Just before their legs shot out, their trochanters would squeeze together. The bumps engaged and rolled against each other, exactly like man-made gears. “I was gobsmacked,” says Sutton.

A close-up of the planthopper's gears. Credit: Malcolm Burrows

A close-up of the planthopper’s gears. Credit: Malcolm Burrows

Gears allow two machines to rotate together in opposite directions. That’s exactly what the planthopper’s trochanter bumps do. Sutton tested this by pulling on the tendons of its jumping muscles with some forceps (“It’s the Serious Edition of Operation”, he says.). Even if he only pulled one tendon, both legs would extend because the gears transmitted the motion of one trochanter into the other.

“Then, we got really lucky because we saw a few jumps where the gears wouldn’t engage perfectly,” says Sutton. When this happened, one leg was partially extended before the gears finally snagged and the planthopper’s nigh-perfect coordination was ruined.

Wait! It gets better. These gears are training wheels!

The planthopper nymphs lose them when they become adults. But the adults don’t shoot off in uncoordinated spins—if anything, they’re better jumpers than the youngsters. Their hind trochanters make much closer contact with each other, and Sutton thinks that the friction between them helps to keep them in time. “We’re kind of sure about that, but not entirely sure,” he says.

“This is to our knowledge the first time that proper, engaging, counter-rotating gears have been seen in the animal kingdom,” says Sutton. Crocodiles have cog-like teeth in their heart valves, and the wheel bug and cog-wheel turtle have teeth on their shells. But none of these structures actually act like gears. “You never see one cog-wheel turtle sidle up next to another, engage their shells, and spin in opposite directions,” says Sutton. “If you did, I want you to call me. If I see that on your website, and I haven’t been called, I will be an angry man.”

The discovery is astounding in itself, but Sutton—a mechanical engineer—thinks that they could help us to make more effective machines at incredibly small scales. The teeth of most modern gears harken back to the 18th century, when mathematician Leonhard Euler designed a shape that could be easily cut by a machine. It’s called an involute and it looks like a hill with a plateau at the top. It has been a standard part of gears ever since.

But the planthopper’s gear teeth look more like a shark fin. “What we have is a prototype for a tooth shape for a high-speed, one-directional gear that’s not constrained by the machining techniques of the 18th century,” says Sutton.



Reference: Burrows & Sutton. 2013. Interacting Gears Synchronize Propulsive Leg Movements in a Jumping Insect. Science

More on jumping insects:

Pygmy Mole Crickets Leap from Water with Spring-Loaded Oars

Leaproach leaps, is roach

There are 8 Comments. Add Yours.

  1. Antti
    September 12, 2013

    The shape of the gear teeth is called wolf’s tooth, and has occasionally been used in very high end watch movements (very old ones, too); most recently by the brothers McGonigle and a few Swiss brands. It’s a variant form of cycloidal gearing. Trickier to make than the typical form, obviously, but the power transfer is cleaner. They’re also really really pretty. :)

  2. Rdizzie
    September 12, 2013

    I could be mistaken but it seems like many neat things found like this will end up on a robot in the very near future. I saw a study on cats and the mechanics of how they do everything a new discovery about how they drank was made, they do not lap but create a negative pressure and use their tongue more like a straw than for lapping as a dog does. Anyways the study was to advance robotics. I am sure that studying many animals will help to advance this area of toy making.

  3. Kathy K.
    September 12, 2013

    Beautiful and fascinating! Animal (insect) gears….love it.

  4. Vaishnavi
    September 13, 2013

    Seriously, wtf evolution?!

  5. Jan Vones
    September 13, 2013

    Outer Slaubvinia? Good to see racism is alive and well in Merry Olde England.

  6. Arlo James Barnes
    September 13, 2013

    I do not know if that is racism, really, but you could make the claim it is trivialising names that sound foreign to English ears, in this case…maybe Central or Eastern European country names (like Slovenia)? Anyway, it does not seem to be malicious since it was done to humorously make a point about the availability of the insects (and by extension, any such fascinating biological phenomena) to the average researcher.

    [The very specific idea was not to name-check any actual country as being representative of an out-of-the way place! – Ed]

  7. Arlo James Barnes
    September 13, 2013

    Although planthoppers (or rather, the evolutionary processes that resulted in their interesting adaptation) are clearly the stars in this article, let’s also give a hand to a scientist’s sense of humour (“If I see that on your website, and I haven’t been called, I will be an angry man”) and the people who made the modern electron micrograph possible.

  8. GoldLions
    April 11, 2014

    Gears, Nature invented it first……

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