Behavioral biologist John Gould was looking for tadpoles late one night at the ephemeral pools in the Watagan Mountains, when he suddenly spotted a tiny black object. Gould thought that it was just a bug swimming across the water’s surface, but when he took a closer look at the scene, he realized that the bug wasn’t on the water’s surface, but under it, and he quickly filmed it.
Later, Gould mentioned the encounter to his colleague Jose Valdez, a wildlife ecologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Leipzig. Valdez thought the observations were interesting, but he’d seen insects walk upright under water before.
“I didn’t fully grasp what he was describing until he showed me the video,” says Valdez. “Then I was floored.”
Searching the scientific literature, the researchers found that some snails could slide along the underside of the water’s surface on a layer of mucus, but little documentation of beetles walking this way existed — just passing mentions in decades-old papers.
How is the beetle able to perform this feat? The scientists think that it is because of the beetle’s buoyancy.
More about this over at Science News.
(Image Credit: Darkone/ Wikimedia Commons)