All Hail The Butt Flicker

Did you know there's an insect that can fling its pee 40 times faster than a cheetah accelerates? We did — thanks to a comic from the Bhamla Lab https://bhamla.gatech.edu/ at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Since 2020, principal investigator Saad Bhamla has been leading the charge to make science more accessible by publishing comics alongside every paper his lab publishes. Today, he introduces Emily https://www.npr.org/people/767284140/emily-kwong to two of the most popular characters — Sheriff Sharpshooter and Captain Cicada — and shares why a comic about butt-flicking insects is a valuable way to take science beyond the lab. Want to hear more about nature's superpowers? Send us an email at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from University of Buffalo, where five decades of AI research is producing advancements that put people first. Tackling real-world problems for progress, not profit. Empowering, not replacing. Learn how the University of Buffalo is using AI responsibly to create a better, brighter future for all at buffalo.edu/NPR.

• 0:22Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:28Emily Kwong?

  Saad Bhamla is a scientist and a tinkerer. At his lab at Georgia Tech, he leads a group studying the physics of life.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  I'm very promiscuous in my organisms, so nothing is off the table.

• 0:41Emily Kwong?

  The Bhamla lab studies the biomechanics, so the movement of different organisms.

• 0:47Emily Kwong?

  Springtails, flamingos, worms, cicadas.

• 0:52Emily Kwong?

  A few years ago, Saad decided to turn one of his lab's research papers into a comic book.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  The Curious Zoo of Extraordinary Organisms: The Slingshot Spider.

• 1:03Emily Kwong?

  This comic is set deep in the Amazon rainforest, and it's all about the slingshot spider. This spider has an amazing adaptation to turn its web into a high-speed trap to catch prey.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  First, the spider grips a silk line of its web with its pedipalps and front legs. A portion of the web is bundled into a tight coil.

• 1:24Emily Kwong?

  A coil so tight, the web takes the shape of a cone.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  And when the spider senses a hapless flying insect, it releases the line with its front legs and flings itself in the web backwards to snack its prey. Ak, eep.

• 1:40Emily Kwong?

  Those are the flies saying ak, eep.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  It's the slingshot spider as it flies through the air like a daredevil.

• 1:48Emily Kwong?

  And the illustrator, Lindsay Lee, drew it like a circus performer. So the spider is being launched out of a cannon with a cape and a crash helmet.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  In fact, it has the fastest full-body motion of any arachnid. What a daredevil. Whee.

• 2:02Emily Kwong?

  Saad read me the whole comic. It was awesome. It's based on actual research, a paper published in the journal Current Biology in 2020 that was led by Simone Alexander. And for a lot of scientists, after publishing, they just call it a day. But back in 2020, when Saad went to check if anyone had actually read the paper,

• 2:21Speaker 02

  I think it was abysmal. I think we got a few clicks on it.

• 2:24Emily Kwong?

  The people reading and clicking were other scientists.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  And it kind of dawned on me that, forget other adults, no kid ever would go to currentbiology.org and actually download this and read this. And so there was this lingering feeling that there has to be a better way to share this beautiful discovery.

• 2:47Emily Kwong?

  So Saad decided that from that point on, for every research paper the lab published, they would also invest in creating a comic book.

• 2:58Emily Kwong?

  Today on the show, we jump into a biophysics comic book to learn how animals eject fluids and why a comic about butt-flicking insects is a valuable way to take science beyond the lab. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from University of Buffalo, where five decades of AI research is producing advancements that put people first, tackling real-world problems for progress, not profit. Empowering, not replacing. Learn how the University of Buffalo is using AI responsibly to create a better, brighter future for all at buffalo.edu/npr.

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• 4:42Emily Kwong?

  Okay, so Saad, your comic series has a name. It's called The Curious Sioux of Extraordinary Organisms.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:52Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, and your main illustrators are Lindsay Lee and Jordan Culver, so shout out to them. We're gonna walk through a couple of the comics, starting with the one called Behold, the Bug That Super Propels Pee. And this comic is all about a bug called the Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter. Who is this character?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  It's a tiny bug.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  They drink juices from plants, like their xylem fluid, and then they leave behind a gift, which is a bacteria called Xylella fastidiosa, which is, creates a lot of problems across the United States, from California to, in the, for vines and then citrus from Florida. But it's a beautiful bug, and it drinks a lot, and it pees a lot.

• 5:42Emily Kwong?

  So the co-creators of this comic, Jordan Culver and Rick Worth, depict this sharpshooter as an outlaw in a cowboy hat with a catapult on its butt to fling away a bead of pee? And this is known as a butt flicker? How did you figure out how the butt flicker works? And how do you even measure the speed at which this glassy-winged sharpshooter ejects its pee into the world?

• 6:08Speaker 02

  I was actually at my son's pre-K, who's a five-year-old, and showing this, and he loves it, and all the kids love it, because they've never seen pee. Like, to me, this is the most beautiful pee in the world. It's like a perfect drop. So we used macro lenses that allow us to zoom in, effectively a microscope but with a high-speed camera. And that's where we kind of focus in on the business end of this bug, which is the butt flicker, like you shared. And yeah, it was, it was so amazing for the first time to see how it flicks these droplets at such high speeds. It's just incredible.

• 6:43Emily Kwong?

  It ejects them, you write in the comic, 40 times faster than a cheetah accelerates?

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:50Emily Kwong?

  And the droplet moves faster than the butt flicker? And you compare it to, like, as if a baseball were to move faster than the arm of the baseball pitcher? How is that even possible? How can the droplet like pick up speed in the air?

• 7:05Speaker 02

  This was the whole conundrum. When my graduate friend, Elio Chalita, who did this work, and he showed me this, I didn't believe it. And we checked again and again. And the kind of aha moment, which is these droplets are compressible. They deform and squishy because of surface tension. So they store energy by squishing it, just like if you had a jello.

• 7:25Emily Kwong?

  Or like a water balloon.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Exactly, like a water balloon. So it can store energy by surface tension. And that was why we call it super propulsion, because it gets some energy for free by storing energy in the deformation or the squishiness of the drop.

• 7:37Emily Kwong?

  And because they're so small, surface tension, you're saying, would keep the drop stuck to them. So it'd be like if our pee just like wouldn't come off of us. So they also need the flicker to just be like, eh, get away.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Precisely. It sticks to them, and so they have to give this flick.

• 7:51Emily Kwong?

  Yeah. And what's cool is in the comic, you say that studying super propulsion like this could help us humans design devices to fling away liquid, too.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  A neat example of this is in your smartwatches or hearing aids. Smartwatches, for example, have a button where after you go for a swim, you can press a button and eject the water to protect the electronics. We think we can learn a trick or two from the sharpshooter and improve the ability of these low-power electronics to eject water from tiny crevices and areas with using very minimal energy.

• 8:28Emily Kwong?

  And our friend, the glossying sharpshooter, makes a return in the comic Captain Cicada and the Jet-Test League, which is based on two papers about fluid ejection and nature. And I want to focus on the part in the comic that's a confrontation between our guy, the sharpshooter, and the much bigger Cicada. So the sharpshooter and the Cicada, they meet on a tree branch, and they're both chugging their xylem beer. And I want you to read me what happens next, okay? Will you play the part of Captain Cicada? I'll be Sheriff Sharpshooter.

• 9:06Emily Kwong?

  Howdy, cousin. Word is that you're hogging all the xylem around these parks.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Oh, no, you already had your comic. It's my turn, Sheriff Shop Shooter.

• 9:15Emily Kwong?

  I think we need to settle this with a good old fashioned shootout.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  How many pieces?

• 9:22Emily Kwong?

  And then what happens?

• 9:23Speaker 02

  It's a battle of fluids. They're, they're shooting, shooting.

• 9:28Emily Kwong?

  They're peeing on each other.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  They're peeing on each other. So they're both drinking xylem fluid. But the cicada, because it's larger, it doesn't need to conserve energy by and doesn't have these butt flickers. So it, you know, loosely speaking, is similar to us or other mammals. Different body structures, but it can make jets at this point.

• 9:48Emily Kwong?

  Yeah. Evolution is amazing because the comic then ends with all these other animals that can jet fluid, like not just pee.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:58Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, you have the archer for fish hunting, the octopus for deception. Together, along with the spitting spider, they become the Jet-Test League. Did Marvel sue you over this?

• 10:14Speaker 02

  That would be interesting. I don't think they even, they haven't even made it on their radar.

• 10:19Emily Kwong?

  All right, got it. What is the feedback you've gotten on this?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  One email I got, this is during the pandemic, a couple of years ago. This was around the time in Lebanon, there was the explosion and the economy was tanking. And there was a lot of children who are now in refugee camps. And so an educator who was doing this for nonprofit reached out and said, oh, I printed all your comics because many of these kids are now displaced and in refugee camps. And we were having a hard time getting textbooks and teaching them. And so the comics reminded them about kind of living systems and biology where in, in certain situations, they may not encounter them. So they really were grateful and appreciative and made my heart kind of warm.

• 11:04Emily Kwong?

  This comic work has garnered quite a bit of attention.

• 11:09Emily Kwong?

  A National Science Foundation Career Grant. You've received so many different forms of recognition for this work. But when you step outside the scientific community, how do you see the comics in regards to like just people who perhaps don't know anything about science and don't trust science?

• 11:33Speaker 02

  I'll tell you a recent story. In December, after Christmas break, we were out camping in the middle of nowhere in Georgia, at the state park, Magnolia Springs State Park. And so I met this local Georgian woman. She lives in a farm nearby and enjoys. And she said, well, what do you do? And I explained, I'm a scientist and I study bugs. And she says, why? Because I really love animals. And we were able to connect because she said, I'll tell you this, but don't report me into animal control. And I was like, why? Why would I do that? She says, I love possums. And I have three possums in my house. They're just like my pets. And this is a person that I would never encounter in Atlanta, Georgia. Right? This is rural Georgia, middle of nowhere.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  But we are still able to connect over our shared love of animals. And I think sometimes it takes stepping out of these ivory towers that scientists put themselves in, writing these fancy journals that really exclude, you know, taxpayers, my neighbors who pay for this. So kind of that's, I think, a little bit on us is on us is to step out of our comfort zone and not underestimate the average American. I think they're resilient, curious, and perhaps sometimes we hold ourselves back.

• 12:59Emily Kwong?

  Saad, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Thank you, Emily. Thank you for doing what you do.

• 13:09Emily Kwong?

  This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy and Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and Jeff Brumfield. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwasi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director. And Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. See you tomorrow on Short Wave from NPR.

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