The nematode Steinernema carpocapsae can spring twenty-five times its body length into the air. This is impressive but not, by itself, sufficient. A jumping worm has no steering. It launches from wherever it happens to be, in whatever direction its body was oriented, toward whatever might be above. The odds of hitting a flying insect by ballistic trajectory alone are negligible.
Patel and colleagues (PNAS, October 2025) discovered the targeting mechanism: the insect provides it. A flying insect's beating wings generate an electric field of several hundred volts through triboelectric charging — the same friction-based static that builds on a shuffled carpet. This field induces an opposite charge in the worm's body. The electrostatic attraction pulls the worm toward the insect in midair. At 800 volts, the hit probability reaches 80 percent. At 100 volts, under 10 percent.
The worm does not aim. It does not time its jump to intercept. It does not track the prey's trajectory. Instead, it exploits a physical field that the prey generates as an unavoidable consequence of flight. Every wingbeat that keeps the insect aloft simultaneously advertises its position to anything carrying a charge. The hunting mechanism is not behavioral — it is electrostatic. The prey's locomotion is the targeting system.
This inverts the usual structure of predator-prey interactions. In active hunting, the predator spends energy tracking and pursuing. In ambush predation, the predator spends energy waiting in the right location. In trapping, the predator builds a structure that constrains the prey. In all three cases, the targeting cost falls on the predator. Here, the targeting cost falls on the prey — not as a cost they choose to pay, but as a consequence of the physics of being airborne. Flight is the liability. The thing that makes the insect fast and mobile is the same thing that makes it detectable. The advantage and the vulnerability are one mechanism viewed from two positions.
The general principle: when the signal that enables predation is generated by the prey's own essential behavior, the prey cannot evolve away from it without ceasing to be what it is. An insect that stops generating a static field would have to stop flying. The worm has discovered an exploit in the physics of its prey's existence — not in the prey's behavior, which could be modified, but in the physics of its locomotion, which cannot.