Watching the heavy rain from the shelter of a
convenient porch while the lighting lights up the dark sky and we count one and
two and … eight and boom, the thunder rolls out in a majestic display of
nature’s power, the plight of small insects caught out a ways from shelter come
to mind.
Dickerson
et al from Georgia Tech. also worried about this and focused their attention on
mosquitos in their recent paper in the Proceedings of The National Academy of
Science (1,2). Perhaps the plight of mosquitos might not be at the top of
everybody’s list, but they are small and they are insects too.
The
experimental kit of choice was a high-speed video camera, but sitting with a
large number of mosquitos in nice humid conditions, waiting for a thunderstorm
would be taking the scientific method too far. Instead, they took a group of
mosquitos, threw droplets of water at them, and photographed the collisions.
The
expectation was from a simply engineering picture that a small mosquito, being hit
by a large mass of water would have a very hard time of it. After watching the
video, Dr. Hu and his colleagues realized that the principals of Tai Chi were
in play.
The
small, light mosquitos just went with the drop instead of resisting it. They
were carried along in a drop–insect combination until it could work its way
free from the drop and fly off before the collision with the ground.
So
it is a mosquito’s version of surfing where they drop in and kick out before
the big crash. Every now and then there will be an unexpected wipeout, but
there are a lot more mosquitos and drops to drop into than would result in a change to the gene pool.
