What Can Splattered Insects Tell Us?

Last Updated (Sunday, 04 September 2011 09:27) Written by Raymond Nakamura

...Sometimes you're the windshield

Sometimes you're the bug

Sometimes it all comes together, baby

Sometimes you're a fool in love...

From song, "The Bug" by Mark Knopfler, Dire Straits

I just returned from our first family road trip in our relatively new car, the front end of which ended up a Jackson Pollock of insect bits. While I was in the driver's seat, I was too busy admiring the Rockies and making sure I didn't plunge over a cliff to scrutinize our accumulation of buggy data. But now that I am back in my virtual scientist's armchair, I decided to look into what might be gleaned from the mess.

Kinetics

Newton's Laws of Motion comes into play when an insect collides with the windshield of a car, the force of the bug on the windshield is equal to the force of the windshield on the bug. The bug experiences a huge acceleration because of its relatively tiny mass. What I'm wondering is what the critical car velocity is for splatter to occur.

Air Pressure?

Jearl Walker in the Flying Circus of Physics argued bugs explode before hitting the windshield, because of lower pressure resulting from the faster moving air over the surface of the car. This is a bit controversial. I wonder if I could convince Science World staff to test this possibility in the vacuum jar.

Aerodynamics

Bug deflectors are secured to the front edge of the hood of usually non-aerodynamic SUVs and trucks, changing the air flow to reduce the number of insects and other projectiles end up on your windshield. But this increases drag, so it will probably increase gas consumption.

Astronomy

To better appreciate the Perseid meteor showers every August, think of this space junk as bugs splattering on the atmospheric windshield of the Earth as it whizzes along its orbit.

Chemistry

This article lists some home recipes for removing bug goo from your windshield. I found that just using the detergent to wash my car worked okay. Fortunately, we never encountered any swarms of locusts.

Taxonomy

That Gunk on Your Car is a book by a biologist that is supposed to help you actually identify insects by the splatter marks on your windshield. I have not tested this myself yet, but it seems worth a try for my next road trip.

Biodiversity

Investigators sampled the DNA of what they scraped off their bumper with a metagenomics technique previously limited to microbes. When you deal with large amounts of data, sometimes you find weird stuff by chance. They connected sequences to the human genome as well. This probably because of some shared sequences and the predominance of human DNA sequences in the databases they used, not evidence that they ran over anybody.

What have you learned from bugs on your windshield?