Baby praying mantises have a superpower: they can execute totally gnarly jumps with blistering speed.
Imagine someone throwing you into the air and spinning two-and-a-half times in a second. This is what it’s like for these little insects, who use their rotational skills to avoid crashing onto the ground after being thrown up by predators or other causes.
This is like asking an ice skater to stop rotating suddenly and accurately face a specific direction, said Malcolm Burrows of the University of Cambridge in a press release accompanying his report published in Current Biology.
Dragonflies, too, can perform awesome aerial stunts. In slow motion, they look pretty cool as well!
