You may have noticed some tiny bugs jumping around in all the snow we've had - they are called snow fleas or springtails.

They are harmless but are important for conditioning soils.

Gale Ridge with the Connecticut Agriculture Experiment Station says the insects have a forked appendage under their bellies that helps snow fleas jump several inches into the air.

They have a high tolerance to cold and have been around before dinosaurs.

Ridge says they are the fastest living spinning animal on the planet.

Ridge says one springtail can spin 368 times a second to a height equivalent to a skyscraper in factions of a seconds.

"They're scavengers and they feed on decaying organic material and little micro organisms. Soils need them they're very busy. We normally don't see them because they're very tiny, but there's millions of them in the soil," said Ridge.

Ridge says there are 8500 species worldwide and every one is different.