The glassy-winged sharpshooter has been known to wreak havoc on crops in the southeastern United States and, most recently, on vineyards in California.

A glassy-winged sharpshooter is capable of ingesting 300 times its body weight in fluid and "catapulting" its pee faster than a cheetah can run.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have been investigating "extreme biophysics," particularly the way one agricultural pest pees and what it can tell us about new forms of speed.

Saad Bhamla is an assistant professor at Georgia Tech's School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. He tweeted in November that he was trying to understand how sharpshooters eject fluid droplets at such high speeds. Teasing to a formal paper coming soon, Bhamla said he and his colleagues "discovered a mechanical spring in the business end of the insect."

When the Washington Post spoke with Bhamla about his research, he explained that sharpshooters are to plants what mosquitoes are to humans. He also said that a tree infested with these "pissing flies" can douse passersby with their vigorous streams.

Bhamla and his colleagues presented some of their findings in a short video after researching two types of sharpshooters. They found that a single sharpshooter can consumer 300 times its body weight per day in fluid, making them "extreme biological pumps."

This is how fast these sharpshooters are in real time and how tiny. Video shot on iPhone. pic.twitter.com/VXWQmMP7kp — Saad Bhamla (@BhamlaLab) November 18, 2018

These insects constantly have to "pee" to prevent buildup in their bodies, the video says. These droplets, excreted from tiny a catapult-like stylus and hairs on their back-ends, can be pushed out at a rate of about 200 meters per second squared. That's about 20 times the accelerations of the earth's gravity and more than twice that of a cheetah, which can get to 60 mph in about 3 seconds.

The urinating skills of the sharpshooter or "pissing fly" is impressive, but these insects are also known to carry and spread Pierce's Disease -- a bacterium that blocks the movement of water within a plant, eventually killing it.

Since 1998, the government and agricultural industry have used $65.2 million to research and combat the sharpshooter and the disease, which threatens California's $2.7 billion wine industry, according to the Wine Institute. The insect is a "strictly southern" species, often found as far west as Texas and as far northeast as the Carolinas. The entomology and nematology department at the University of Florida found the sharpshooter as far south as Leesburg, Fla., and even some in South Florida.

Bhamla and his colleagues submitted their video of findings last month to the American Physical Society's Gallery of Fluid Motion. In January, they're set to present some of their work at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology conference in Tampa.

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