The electrostatic world of insects

https://www.wired.com/story/the-secret-electrostatic-world-of-insects/

by noleary • 2 years ago

198 49 2 years ago

amelius• 2 years ago

If insects can build up 5 kilovolts while flying, then why can I zap flies with a fly-zapping tool that presumably runs at a similar or lower voltage?

chmod775• 2 years ago

When they fly, there's no current. They just have potential compared to ground. Also presumably their electrical charge is very low and there's going to be hardly any amps when they discharge.

In the same vein, if your carpet gives you a static shock, that's likely going to be thousands of volts. But obviously there isn't actually a lot of energy stored (all you did was convert some friction), so there's next to no amperes, little work the electricity can do, and thus no harm.

codeflo• 2 years ago

It's not a bad question, these units of measurements are always a bit confusing. You can similarly ask why for humans, rubbing a balloon is harmless, although that builds up 30 kV of static electricity, while touching a 230 V power socket can kill you.

Voltage is merely the "pressure" that charged particles experience. Voltage alone tells you nothing about how much charge is actually available once electricity is allowed to flow. And that's where the harm comes from. For static electricity, when you touch something, you get maybe a microcoulomb, once, and it's gone. For a power socket, you get up to 16 coulombs per second continuously.

ocfnash• 2 years ago

As a kid, the alliterative mnemonic we were taught was "current kills".

BoxOfRain2• 2 years ago

Hence the saying 'it's the volts that jolt and the mills that kill'.

brk• 2 years ago

For many of the same reasons that birds can land on high voltage lines without risk of being electrocuted. A flying insect has stored voltage with no path to ground, or any point with low resistance and lower potential.

When you hit a flying insect with a zapper you are supplying a high potential and low potential electrode. The insects body completes the circuit and the stored voltage is routed through the insect, rendering it a flightless blob of goo.

ggm• 2 years ago

Could a cloud of midges make a path to ground for lightning?

hagbard_c• 2 years ago

"Assume a cloud of midges 10 cm wide and 2500 m high" [1]

[1] https://www.sphericalcowblog.com/spherical-cows

palata• 2 years ago

Webs deformed instantly when jolted with static from flies, aphids, honeybees, and even water droplets. Spiders caught charged insects more easily.

This is all so fascinating!

anthk2• 2 years ago

There was an electric/bug Pokémon ensembling an spider, now I know why.

https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Galvantula_(Pok%C3...

Yes, Pokémon has tons of real life weird biologycs inside. Such as that volcano snail, (Slugma/Magcargo) which exists IRL:

https://www.wired.com/2015/02/absurd-creature-of-the-week-sc...

smolder3• 2 years ago

Your pokemon example predates any of this research by a few years and so it certainly wouldn't have been known by the creators. It's a coincidence.

highfrequency• 2 years ago

The magic of animal electrostatics is all about size. Large animals don’t meaningfully experience nature’s static—we’re too big to feel it. “As humans, we are living mostly in a gravitational or fluid-dynamics world,” Ortega-Jiménez said. But for tiny beings, gravity is an afterthought. Insects can feel air’s viscosity. While the same laws of physics reign over Earth’s smallest and largest species, the balance of forces shifts with size.

Very cool article. For example: butterflies accumulate a positive charge when beating their wings, which causes pollen to jump through the air toward them when they land on flowers.

Swizec• 2 years ago

Similar to this, one of the most mind-blowing papers I’ve read was Life at Low Reynold’s Number about how at the microorganism level water is virtually solid and inertia does not exist.

https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/purcell.pdf https://swizec.com/blog/week-9-life-at-low-reynolds-number/

MrLeap• 2 years ago

Inertia doesn't exist? Wow that's hard to visualize. Perhaps the world does converge on cellular automata as you zoom in

hermitcrab4• 2 years ago

When you are very big (like an elephant), gravity is all important and surface tension barely matters.

When you are very small (like an ant), it is the other way around.

Toss a mouse from a building. It will land, shake itself off and scamper away. But if similarly dropped, “… a rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.” So wrote J.B.S. Haldane in his 1926 essay "On Being the Right Size." https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27082

tommiegannert• 2 years ago

The same question scales outwards. Are there forces taking over from gravity at galactic scale? Like, perhaps the galaxy filaments and voids come about due to something we can't even comprehend. It seems unlikely that humans just happen to be working with the force at the largest "scale."

How complicated would it be for a small insect to explain gravity, if they're not normally affected by it in their daily routine?

I recently thought about something similar: it seems like at certain scales, things turn into spheres, based on applicable forces. And then there are in-between regions with chaos. Atoms seem mostly round. Humans are not. If planets and stars are at the next spherical scale, are there even larger structures out there that once again show spherical nature, once you're past galaxies, clusters and filaments?

deciplex• 2 years ago

The universe itself, if bounded, might be a hypersphere.

hnuser123456• 2 years ago

Since black holes grow with their radius proportional to mass (not volume), larger black holes are less dense. The current estimates for the size and mass of the universe fits right on the line of that curve of critical density.

tomcam• 2 years ago

Username particularly appropriate

j_bum• 2 years ago

Excellent article, and some fascinating discoveries. The idea of passive pollen spread via static buildup on pollinators make sense, but is kind of mind blowing to me at the same time.

For a much more enjoyable reading experience (at least on mobile):

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-hidden-world-of-electrost...

rsynnott• 2 years ago

A few years after Ortega-Jiménez noticed spiderwebs nabbing bugs, Robert’s team found that bees can gather negatively charged pollen without brushing up against it.

It's arguably kind of weird that this is just being noticed now. I suppose possibly modern camera equipment helps, for purposes of actually _seeing_ it happen...

HPsquared• 2 years ago

See also magnetic sensing (magnetoreception) in animals used for orientation and navigation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoreception

There are other electromagnetic type things too, like use of light (camouflage, bioluminescence, eyes) and electricity (electric eels, bioelectrical cues for stem cell differentiation).

EDIT: Also the literal electrical potential within cells: the membrane potential, that is the voltage difference between inside and outside every cell.

An interesting area!

NotGMan• 2 years ago

(From the same article:)

Interesting that ticks literally get pulled like a magnet towards their targets due to electrostatic forces.

This article has multiple videos of it:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)...

LinuxAmbulance• 2 years ago

I am not a fan of this evolutionary step in design.

lofaszvanitt• 2 years ago

All this in 55 pages of text. Wired, never changes. They rob your time with unnecessary wall of text. blablablbla

w33n1s• 2 years ago

Really interesting article. Highlights something I think is so cool but have a hard time really articulating: how even within our own 3+1 dimensions, just changing your scale is an entirely different experience.

mcosta• 2 years ago

Some forces are O(n^2). Other are ratios between volume and mass.

Also there are critical points. You can't have any arbitrary mass of hydrogen in space, at some point it collapses ant starts to burn.

cartfisk• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/T1bds

smolder3• 2 years ago

This makes me wonder if cave dwelling species which live in darkness have any specially evolved features dealing with electric charge.

ysofunny• 2 years ago

but if anybody regular worries about the (quite new) abundance of EM radiation one's the nutjob

hermitcrab4• 2 years ago

We've always lived amongst abundant EM radiation.

devm0de• 2 years ago

Not the man made kind, which are different from natural sources and greatly increase the background EM fields we live in.

matt_j• 2 years ago

The way I understand it, there is one EM field and photons of various frequencies travel in that field: radio, microwave, infra-red, visible, ultra-violet, x-ray, gamma.

We are awash with EM radiation of almost all frequencies from the universe. A little 5G probably isn't our biggest problem.

Besides, this article is more about electo-static forces, and how, when you're very small, these are much more significant than the gravitational force, which makes sense.

paulorlando• 2 years ago

"They were using a toy wand that gathers static charge to levitate lightweight objects, such as a balloon." -- How much science progresses through play.

hermitcrab4• 2 years ago

spiders take flight by extending a silk thread to catch charges in the sky

I did some amateur research on spider ballooning many years ago and I believe part of the lift comes from rising air dragging along the silk thread. From my calculations, it wasn't enough to lift the spider on its own, but it might allow the spider to fall slower than the convective air currents were rising.

The electrostatic world of insects

Related Stories