Leaping by Soft-Bodied Drosophilid Larvae

Abstract

Rapid movement is challenging for soft-bodied animals with short or no legs (Harvey and Zukoff, 2011). Leaping enables animals to move at relatively high speeds, but legless leaping usually requires sophisticated energy storage by rigid structure-based release mechanisms, as seen in click beetles and trap-jaw ants (Ribak and Weihs, 2011; Sorger, 2015). Among animals with soft-bodied wormlike builds, leaping has been recorded in only a few animals. Maggots have long been believed as the only example of jumping by a soft-bodied legless organism (Maitland 1992), while it has been recently demonstrated that larvae of a tiger beetle Cicindela dorsalis and entomophagous nematodes also have similar leaping behavior (Campbell and Kaya, 1999; Harvey and Zukoff, 2011).