"Psyllids are more than plant-sucking, disease-spreading insects." How's that for a glowing testimonial?
In his video by Dr. Adrian Smith of the Evolutionary Biology & Behavior Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences & North Carolina State University, you'll probably learn everything you's ever want to know about psyllids.
Jumping plant lice, or psyllids, are the fastest front-flipping insects, but not many people know about how amazing they are! I set out to film the high-flying flips of these plant-feeding, often thought of as "pest", insects. They are hemipterans in the superfamily Psylloidea and are often referred to as "psyllids". Most of the shots, unless other with labeled in the video, were captured at 3,200 frames per second. If you want to read more about how they jump, the research study I mentioned in the video is this: Jumping mechanisms in jumping plant lice (Hemiptera, Sternorrhyncha, Psyllidae) by M. Burrows (2012) Journal of Experimental Biology 215: 3612-3621; doi: 10.1242/jeb.074682
