Energy Stored to Amplify Power

black beetle stands at the top of a green leaf

Biological Strategy

Click beetles

AskNature Team

Image: Katja Schulz / Flickr / CC BY - Creative Commons Attribution alone

Store Energy

Once a living system captures energy or transforms one energy form into another, it must frequently save that energy for future use. But energy is difficult to store in some forms. So living systems need strategies to either use energy quickly, or to convert it from forms that are difficult to store (such as electrical or kinetic) to more storable forms. For example, grasshoppers store energy as potential energy in an elastic material in their tendons. When they need to jump, that energy converts into kinetic energy, providing the force needed to escape predators.

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Transform Mechanical Energy

Mechanical energy is made up of kinetic energy (the energy of an object in motion) and potential energy (stored energy). Organisms use mechanical energy in a variety of ways, including capturing prey, transporting seeds, and moving around.

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Insects

Class Insecta (“an insect”): Flies, ants, beetles, cockroaches, fleas, dragonflies

Insects are the most abundant arthropods—they make up 90% of the animals in the phylum. They’re found everywhere on earth except the deep ocean, and scientists estimate there are millions of insects not yet described. Most live on land, but many live in freshwater or saltwater marshes for part of their life cycles. Insects have three distinct body sections: a head, which has specialized mouthparts, a thorax, which has jointed legs, and an abdomen. They have well-developed nervous and sensory systems, and are the only invertebrate that can fly, thanks to their lightweight exoskeletons and small size.

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Click beetles store work to amplify power a thousandfold by deforming their external cuticle.

“And that’s where energy storage comes in. Down to the size of a trout or a squid tentacle, unaided muscle can do a decent job with nothing more than ordinary leverage. Below that, muscle needs help; in practice, energy is put in slowly and stored elastically. Some kind of trigger then releases it at a higher rate. Work and energy may be conserved, but power gets amplified…A click beetle stores up work by deforming the external cuticle; its power amplification is fully a thousandfold (Evans 1973). Each of these creatures has some kind of a mechanical catch to prevent premature extension while the work is being put in; the specific arrangements, though, are different for each case.” (Vogel 2003:476)

(D) The body can be divided into two subunits linked by a hinge, which contains a latch contact of the peg and mesosternal lip. This schematic is adapted from Bolmin et al. (2017). (E) During the pre-jump stage, the peg retracts from the cuticular cavity and latches on the mesosternal lip, moving from the resting position ii to the brace position i. The brace body position is maintained by the peg/lip contact. The motion is reversed when the latch is released. (Bolmin, 2019)