On
NPR this morning, I heard the story of work recently published in
Science. It's the first instance of mechanical gears found naturally occurring in the wild.
Apparently the nymph planthopper insect likes to jump to move around. And to jump well, it need both legs to kick off at exactly the same time, otherwise it goes off in the wrong direction, or just spins around. Since its nervous system isn't yet up to the task, it uses gears that interlock so when one leg starts to kick off, the other leg does too.
In order to film this extremely fast movement, the scientists glued the little critters to the table on their backs, and tickled their tummies while filming with an extremely high speed camera they could then slow down.
The video clearly shows gears!
