: How does a grasshopper generate so much power to hop?
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They use a catapult…no, seriously, bear with me.
Muscles, including grasshopper muscles, can either product a lot of force slowly or a small force very quickly, but it’s *very* hard for them to a large force quickly, which is what you’d think you want for developing high instantaneous power like jumping.
So grasshoppers don’t do that…they do the same thing we do with catapults (or bows, as in bows & arrows)…they use a very large muscle to *slowly* bend a spring, storing a lot of energy over a long period of time, then release that spring energy all at once to release the stored energy very quickly…very high power, albeit for very short time.
The “spring” is part of their back legs. Grasshoppers have a *huge* (proportionally) leg muscle they use to slowly bend their back legs to jumping position, compressing specialized tissue in their legs that’s very “springy”…it can store energy. When they release to jump, all the stored energy comes out *very* quickly.
A guy at the University of St. Andrews made a terrific details explanation of this, including pictures and animations: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wjh/jumping/index.html
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