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They are called trap-jaw ants and are now the holders of a new record in the animal world: the fastest bite ever recorded. And the hardest too.
This type of ants, usually found in Central and South Africa, close their jaws at a speed of 100 km/h (66mps), which makes them the owners of the world record for the fastest move of a body part. At least in the animal world that is…
The speed at which these ants move their jaws was recorded using high-speed digital video camera filming at 50,000 frames per second, by researchers at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.
These "trap-jaw ants" can capture their prey with a strike more than 2,000 times faster than the blink of a human eye and escape predators by propelling themselves in backward leaps with a snap of their jaws at more than 100,000 times the force of gravity.
That makes it faster than the mantis shrimp, former record holder for fastest strike, according to researchers led by Sheila Patek, assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
"The mandibles are operating in the outer known limits in biology in terms of speed and acceleration," she said. "The ants' jaws are relatively short, but they deliver such a powerful bite because they can accelerate so quickly. It's simple physics."
"These are phenomenal animals," said Brian Fisher, from California Academy of Sciences, by phone from Australia, where he is running an ant research course. "You can actually hear their jaws clicking when they snap, but you can't see them at all because they move so fast."
Experts had thought no animal could move more quickly than the mantis shrimp, which delivers a powerful kick at 75 feet per second.
These powerful jaws could serve as inspirations for the propulsion systems of miniature robots used for rescue operations, says researcher Andrew Suarez, an ecologist and entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Suarez distinctly remembered the first time he and fellow researcher Brian Fisher at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco dug up a trap-jaw ant colony "and had them shooting all over the place like popcorn—many of which landed on us and started stinging."
"Until recently, cameras were simply not fast enough to capture the movement of the mandibles," Suarez said. He and his colleagues had to use high-speed video cameras capable of taking up to 250,000 frames per second to film the ant jaws, roughly 10,000 faster than speeds movies are usually shot at.
Experiments conducted by the two scientists and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed the ants were using their jaws to snap at prey, strike at intruders or flee from predators.
In attacks against intruders, dubbed "bouncer defenses," the ants slam their mandibles against their targets—in experiments, thin strips of plastic or metal—presumably to injure them or bounce them away. Coincidentally, this can also catapult the ants up to 15 inches away. This distance, translated for a 5-foot-6-inch tall person, roughly equates to a record-shattering Olympic long jump of 132 feet.
When the researchers introduced predators such as spiders, the trap-jaw ants at times used so-called "escape jumps," directing their jaws toward the ground, launching themselves up to 3 inches in the air. For our 5-foot-6-inch Olympian, that's 44 feet. The world record in the high jump is just slightly over 8 feet.
“If they bite something which is too hard to be crushed or thrown back by their jaws, the impact tosses them upwards” said Dr Andy Suarez, a co-author in the study.
The popcorn-effect of so many ants jumping in the air at once is said to have also served at confusing attackers.
"The results show us the surprising and interesting ways in which a single mechanical system can be co-opted for such different behaviours," says Dr Sheila Patek.
