Still can't quite believe I was lucky enough to be awarded the John and Laurine Proud Postdoctoral fellowship from the Lizard Island Reef Research Foundation. Spending 3 weeks on the island with @emweschke.bsky.social, finding and studying coral reef spiders underwater was an absolute dream! 🕷️🌊

My photo made it onto the cover of @pnas.org! 🎉You can read the related article about the amazing morphologies of treehoppers increasing their sensitivity to static electricity here: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Then Ryan Palmer, working w/ Isaac Chenchiah, mathematically modelled the electrical sensitivity of these hairs. Long story short: different types of hairs on the pronotum could allow treehoppers to detect both the magnitude and polarity of charges (remember these vary between wasps and bees!)

But how are the treehoppers detecting electricity? The pronotum is covered in various mechanosensory hairs - using laser Doppler vibrometry, Liam O'Reilly showed that the hairs are deflected by electric fields, just like how your hairs stand up when you pass underneath a powerline

Sidenote: we interestingly see that the electric field >0.2mm away from the treehopper is actually LOWER in the extreme morphology case. This means that as well as boosting the treehopper's electrical sensitivity, the extreme pronotum might also make them less detectable by electoreceptive predators

This likely greatly increases the sensitivity of treehoppers to static electricity! Don't worry, we also actually checked that treehoppers can detect static electricity, and found that they retreat from electric fields, suggesting predator avoidance.

Our charge measurements also allowed us to computationally model the electric field between typically charged treehoppers and predators - comparing the real, extreme shaped treehopper, to a hypothetical "boring" one, we see that the extreme shape boosts the electric field by 2 orders of magnitude!

And we found charges on all of them! More than that, there are significant differences in the magnitude and polarity (positive or negative) of charges carried by the dangerous wasps vs friendly bees. So theoretically, treehoppers have the electrical information to distinguish friend from foe!

First things first - do they actually accumulate static electricity in the high humidity of the tropical rainforest? We used a device called a picoammeter, which detects tiny currents, to measure the electrostatic charge of the treehoppers, wasps, and bees as they flew, jumped, or dropped through it

So I had to make the great noble sacrifice of travelling to beautiful Costa Rica, to find the really cool treehoppers that live there. I hunted down as many treehopper species as I could find, as well as the wasps that hunt them, and the stingless bees that protect them from these predators

Unfortunately, treehoppers are remarkably unremarkable in the UK, where I was working at the time. There's only two species, and they aren't quite as interesting as the over 3000 species found in the tropics - see below for the finest British biodiversity...

Given our history working on the role of static electricity in nature, we had an idea - what if these elaborate structures boost their sensitivity to static electricity? Like how a tree in an open field is most likely to be struck by lightning, could these extreme shapes increase electric fields?

In some species, the function of the treehopper's pronotum (the body part that forms the crazy structures) is intuitive - for example, there are species that look like thorns, which presumably helps them hide from predators or injure attackers. But in many species, a function is not obvious...

Treehoppers are amazing. These insects are ridiculously morphologically diverse, exhibiting a huge variety of shapes, often with very extreme structures like spines, spikes, and globes. But the reasons for this diversity of extreme forms have remained somewhat enigmatic - we wanted to explore this