Name: To Survive, This Bug Builds a House of Bubbles | ScienceTake
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T03:41:52.000Z
Duration: 2 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

you've seen something like this on plants.

Maybe you thought, “gross,” and walked away.

But if you're 8 years old, or a scientist interested

in how insects breathe, you might have looked inside

That's the nymph or young form of an insect called

One idea was that it served as protection.

to find the bugs to bring back to the laboratory, or to watch

A spittle bug sucks up watery sap from plants.

As it excretes urine, it forms the bubbles.

Consequently, it excretes a lot of urine, about 150 to 280 times

The foam creates a kind of cocoon for the young insect

to grow, as well as offering protection from birds, wasps

Does the nymph breathe through those bubbles?

The bug sticks the tip of its abdomen up out of the foam

You can see it just breaking the surface.

Measurements of carbon dioxide in the bug's environment

and oxygen in the bubbles show that it is breathing

However, if it's threatened, it sinks down

It doesn't stay there long unless it has to.

Then, it pops smaller bubbles to form a larger

one that it can breathe though, like an emergency air supply.

Then, once the coast is clear, the spittle bug can re-emerge.

Eventually, the nymph forms one big bubble,

hides inside it and undergoes a transformation

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To Survive, This Bug Builds a House of Bubbles | ScienceTake

eventually

gross

average

environment