Researchers first to show hinge morphology of click beetle's latch mechanism

February 18, 2019, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Aimy Wissa, assistant professor of mechanical science and engineering (MechSE) at Illinois, leads an interdisciplinary research team to study click beetles to inspire more agile robots. The team, which includes MechSE Assistant Professor Alison Dunn and Dr. Marianne Alleyne, a research scientist in the Department of Entomology, recently presented their ongoing and novel work on the quick release mechanism of click beetles at the 2019 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) Annual Meeting.

Ophelia Bolmin, a graduate student in Wissa's Bio-inspired Adaptive Morphology (BAM) Lab, presented novel synchrotron X-ray footage that showed the internal latch mechanism of the click beetle, and demonstrated for the first time to the scientific community how the hinge morphology and mechanics enable this unique clicking mechanism. The presentation, "The click beetle latch mechanism: An in-vivo study using synchrotron X-rays," was part of an invited symposium on mechanisms of energy flow in organismal movement.

This work builds on research that was initiated by the Illinois team nearly two years ago, detailing the click beetles' legless self-righting jumping mechanism. The team already built prototypes of a hinge-like spring-loaded device that are being incorporated into a robot.

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Photos: A Green Glow Worm from the Amazon

by Tia Ghose, Staff Writer | November 18, 2014 12:30pm ET

A few years ago, nature photographer Jeff Cremer discovered tiny pinpricks of glowing light in a wall of Earth in Peru. When he took a closer look, he discovered a mysterious species of glow worm. Cremer brought the glow worm to the attention of entomologists. It turned out that these little glowing worms were actually larvae of a beetle species. Though scientists still don't know the exact species, similar click beetles have been found in Brazil.

Cremer saw the first signs of the mysterious beetle in a wall of Earth near the Tambopata Research Center in the Peruvian Amazon. When he got a closer look, he found several dozen worms that were about 0.5 inches (1.27 centimeters) in length. 

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