Faster than Bolt, the ‘360mph’ ant
IT may have tiny legs, but a species of ant has earned a place alongside nature’s kings of speed.
While the Saharan silver ant cannot match the pace of a cheetah, relative to its size it is one of the fastest creatures on the planet. Swinging its six legs incredibly quickly, it can cover a yard – around 108 times its body length – in just over a second.
Although that is only 2mph, it is the equivalent of a man running at 360mph – 12 times faster than Olympic sprint champion Usain Bolt. German scientists who filmed the ant, Latin name Cataglyphis bombycina, said it may be close to the limits its body could take.
It takes up to 47 strides a second, compared with Bolt’s four. The research, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, makes the ant, pictured below, the third-fastest creature relative to its size – the California coastal mite can travel at 377 body lengths a second and the Australian tiger beetle can manage 171.
The ants, which are a third of an inch long, are such fast movers because they have to run out of their nests to scavenge for dead insects on sand that reaches temperatures of up to 60C (140F).
They forage in the heat of the day to avoid predators, silver hairs on their back acting as a sunshade.
The ants were filmed running at 33.7in (85.5cm) a second as they left the nest in dunes near salt lakes on the edge of the Sahara in central Tunisia. In the lab at a much cooler 10C (50F), however, they moved far slower, at just over two inches a second. A close relative of the silver ant, Cataglyphis fortis, which also lives in the Tunisian salt flats, reaches only 24.5in (62cm) a second, or 50 body lengths, in the desert heat, despite having much longer legs. Lead author Professor Harald Wolf, of the University of Ulm, said: ‘Even among desert ants, the silver ants are special. The most surprising thing is that the ants achieve their speed with relatively short legs.’ He suspects it must require muscle contraction speeds close to the ant’s physiological limits.