Pure Pedantry : Crazy Videos of Ants

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Jake Young is a MD/PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine focusing in Neuroscience. He is due to graduate in 2032. He received a BS and a MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University -- where he spent most of his time drinking heavily and building vegetable catapults instead of learning information that would now be eminently useful. When he is not failing terrifically to perform his sworn duties, he enjoys watching bad movies, ethnic food, and running.

Pure Pedantry is a blog about science -- social sciences and otherwise -- as well as academic and scientific culture. No one can live on science alone, so I also like to dwell on pop culture, periodically explore the humanities, and indulge in other types of geeky goodness.

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Crazy Videos of Ants

Category: Aminals
Posted on: August 23, 2006 11:09 PM, by Jake Young

Did you know that ants snap their mandibles together so fast that they can throw themselves in the air? Check out this (click on the video link to watch it):

When trap-jaw ants need to get out quick, they use their heads, not their legs to escape. This large species of Costa Rican ant smashes its jaw into the ground, causing the ant to catapult up and away from danger.
Videos of Odontomachus bauri show that this ant can propel itself 8 centimetres up into the air using jaws that snap shut at a speed of nearly 65 metres per second -- perhaps the fastest predatory strike measured.

Brian Fisher of the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, and colleagues filmed the ants to help settle a lab bet about whether it was faster than the mantis shrimp, which flails its club-shaped front leg at peak speeds of 23 metres per second to shatter the hard shells of its prey.

The team used a high-speed video camera to film seven trap-jaw ants in action at 50,000 frames per second (see videos). The results were a surprise. "We found that the jaws were closing at triple the speeds previously thought," says Sheila Patek, a biologist and co-author on the paper.