44-year-old mystery of how fleas jump resolved
If you thought that we know everything about how the flea jumps, think again. In 1967, Henry Bennet-Clark discovered that fleas store the energy needed to catapult themselves into the air in an elastic pad made of resilin. However, in the intervening years debate raged about exactly how fleas harness this explosive energy. Bennet-Clark and Miriam Rothschild came up with competing hypotheses, but neither had access to the high speed recording equipment that could resolve the problem. Turn the clock forward to Malcolm Burrows' Cambridge lab in 2010. 'We were always very puzzled by this debate because we'd read the papers and both Henry and Miriam put a lot of evidence for their hypotheses in place and their data were consistent with each other but we couldn't understand why the debate hadn't been settled,' says Burrows' postdoc, Gregory Sutton. He adds, 'We had a serendipitous set of hedgehog fleas show...