Ant’s jaws could make it the fastest animal on Earth
The Dracula ant is not much of a traveler. Located mostly in the tropics of Africa, Australia and Asia, the tiny creatures spend most of their lives burrowed into tree trunks or underground, to the endless frustration of scientists who would like to study them.
So, imagine the surprise of the researchers who recently discovered that Dracula ants might be the fastest animals on earth.
To be clear, you could easily beat the Dracula ant in a foot race. But one species, Mystrium camillae, has a pair of ingeniously designed mandibles that can snap at 200 mph, according to a study published Wednesday in Royal Society Open Science. That’s 5,000 times faster than you can blink your eye and 1,000 times faster than you can snap your fingers. It’s also three times faster than the mandibles of the trap-jaw ant, the previous fastest-moving insect on record.
The findings provide new insight into ant evolution and could help engineers design more powerful and efficient machines.
Frederick Larabee, an entomologist at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, had been studying ants with powerful jaws at the University of Illinois in 2014 when his colleague, Andrew Suarez, was lucky enough to collect two colonies of Dracula ants in Borneo.
“We had spent four or five years trying to get a single colony,” containing thousands of insects, Larabee said. “But we were never able to get more than a few workers.”
Once Suarez brought the colonies back to his Illinois lab, the researchers quickly realized that their equipment wasn’t powerful enough to study them.
“The ants were so fast that we couldn’t slow their motion down with the cameras we had,” Larabee said.