Wouldn't it be cool to be granted a super power? But then you find out that power of "superpropulsion" is the ability to fling drops of urine at high speeds. Comic book editors are going to love that. Although they've come up with worse.
The glassy-winged sharpshooter is a kind of leafhopper and an agricultural pest. It sucks fluids out of plants. Since the sap is 95% water, they drink a lot to get the nutrients they need, and have to expel a lot of water. Lucky for them, they have an anal catapult that expels a drop of water, and when it reaches a certain size, flings it away with a lot of force for a tiny insect. The physics and fluid dynamics of this pee-shooter are explained at Ars Technica. The upshot of this complicated mechanism is that it actually uses much less energy than just streaming urine like civilized animals. Flinging urine far away makes it harder for predators to smell their exact location. A study out of Georgia Tech gives us the visual above.
Other insects are "frass-shooters," "butt-flickers," and "turd-hurlers," but the glassy-winged sharpshooter is the only insect we know of that is blessed with superpropulsion.
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