Science / Medicine : Medfly Grubs Can Leap Away From Predators

Maggots of the Mediterranean fruit fly, the bane of California agriculture officials, have a mechanism of locomotion for escaping predators, according to a report last week in the British journal Nature.

The soft-bodied, legless grubs curl up into loops, building up a relatively enormous hydrostatic pressure inside their bodies that is counteracted by muscular tension, according to biologist David P. Maitland of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. When the tension of the muscles is suddenly released, he said, the maggots fly through the air at about 20 inches per second, propelling them out of the way of ants and other predators.

Although this is hardly faster than a speeding bullet, it is 200 times faster than the maggots’ top crawling speed. The discovery, said journal editors, “lends a whole new meaning to the term creepy-crawly .”