Secrets of insect excretion: how and why sharpshooters use droplet superpropulsion

Food consumption and waste elimination are vital functions for living systems. Although how feeding impacts animal form and function has been studied for more than a century, how its obligate partner, excretion, controls, and constraints animal behavior remains largely unexplored. In this talk, I will describe how millimeter-scale sharpshooter insects eliminate their high-volume excreta by exploiting droplet superpropulsion, a phenomenon in which they can achieve higher velocities than the underlying actuator through temporal tuning. I will discuss why they have evolved to take advantage of this droplet ejection mechanism through energetic and scaling arguments.