На информационном ресурсе применяются рекомендательные технологии (информационные технологии предоставления информации на основе сбора, систематизации и анализа сведений, относящихся к предпочтениям пользователей сети "Интернет", находящихся на территории Российской Федерации)

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How some insects fling their pee

Author: Emily Conover / Source: Science News for Students

a photo of a glassy-winged sharpshooter sitting on vegetation
Sharpshooter insects (one shown) slurp hundreds of times their body weight in sap each day. That means they pee constantly, flinging it out of the way using a tiny barb on their rear ends.

Some sap-sucking insects can “make it rain.” Known as sharpshooters, they fling droplets of pee while feeding on plant juices.

Scientists have finally shown how they create these sprays. The insects use tiny structures that catapult these wastes at high accelerations.

Sharpshooters can do serious damage. The pests slurp hundreds of times their body weight daily. In the process, they can move bacteria into plants that cause disease. Take glassy-winged sharpshooters. They have spread beyond their native range in the southeastern United States. In California, for instance, they have sickened vineyards. And they’ve wreaked havoc on the South Pacific island of Tahiti by poisoning spiders that eat sharpshooters.

A tree infested with sharpshooters sprinkles a steady pitter-patter of pee. This can dampen people walking by. “It’s crazy just to look at,” says Saad Bhamla. He is an engineer at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. That rain of pee got Bhamla and his colleagues hooked on studying how the insects release this waste.

The researchers took high-speed video of two sharpshooter species — the glassy-winged and blue-green types. The video showed the insects feeding and then flinging their pee. The videos also revealed that a tiny barb on the insect’s rear end acts like a spring. Once a drop…

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