Baby Praying Mantis Makes Death-Defying Leap Into Air

Baby praying mantises execute totally gnarly jumps with blistering speed:

These little insects don't use wings, but rely on impressive rotational skills - equivalent to spinning their bodies around two-and-a-half times in a second - to almost always stick the landing.

"This is akin to asking an ice skater who is rotating at the same speed as these mantises to stop suddenly and accurately to face a specific direction," Malcolm Burrows of the University of Cambridge said in a press release accompanying a report published in the journal Current Biology.

Mantises aren't the only ones with great aerial maneuvers - dragonflies in slo-mo look pretty impressive, too.