You might feel a spark when you talk to your crush, but living things don’t require romance to make electricity. A study was published in October 24, 2012. iScienceIt is possible to do so. Electricity naturally produced by insects like honeybees, locusts, and other swarming insectsIt is an overlooked contributor to the overall electric charge in the atmosphere.
“Particles in the atmosphere easily charge up,” says Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham who was not involved with the study. “Insects are little particles moving around the atmosphere.” Despite this, the potential that insect-induced static electricity plays a role in the atmosphere’s electric field, which influences how water droplets form, dust particles move and lightning strikes brew, hasn’t been considered before, he says.
For a long time scientists have been aware of the tiny electric charge that insects carry. Researchers discovered by chance that an electric bug-aloo could change the charge in the air.
“We were actually interested in understanding how atmospheric electricity influences biology,” says Ellard Hunting, a biologist at the University of Bristol in England. But when a swarm of honeybees passed over a sensor meant to pick up background atmospheric electricity at the team’s field station, the scientists began to suspect that the influence could flow the other way too.
Hunting and other colleagues, including biologists, measured the increase in electric charge strength when other honeybees passed over the sensor. The average voltage rise was 100 volts/meter. The charge produced by an insect swarm is greater the denser it is.
This inspired the team’s thinking about larger insect swarms such as the biblical plague of locusts in Egypt. Las Vegas, Nevada in 2021 (SN: 3/30/21)). As they fly through the air, flying objects (from animals to planes) create static electricity. The charges of desert locusts was measured by the team.Schistocerca gregariaThey flew in a wind tunnel powered with a computer fan. The team used data from other studies to calculate the locust density and then created a computer simulation using the honeybeeswarm data. This allowed them to convert these individual locust measurements into estimates of electric charges for the entire locust population. Scientists report that clouds of locusts could generate electricity per meter on par with storm clouds.
Hunting states that the results show the need for researchers to discover the unexplored lives of airborne animal, which sometimes reach greater heights then honeybees or locusts. Spiders, for example, can soar kilometers above Earth when “ballooning”Silk threads for new habitatsSN: 7/5/18). “There’s a lot of biology in the sky,” he says, from insects and birds to microorganisms. “Everything adds up.”
Dwyer states that even though some insects swarms can grow to be enormous, it is unlikely that electrically charged flying creatures will ever achieve the density necessary to produce lightning like storm clouds. However, their presence could hamper our efforts to monitor for looming strikes which could harm property or hurt people.
“If you have something messing up our electric field measurements, that could cause a false alarm,” he says, “or it could make you miss something that’s actually important.” While the full effect that insects and other animals have on atmospheric electricity remains to be deduced, Dwyer says these results are “an interesting first look” into the phenomenon.
Hunting states that this first step in a new area of research is an example of how scientists from different fields can come up with surprising findings. “Being really interdisciplinary,” he says, “allows for these kinds of serendipitous moments.”
