Heck Of A Guy

That Bites

Between movie ants destroying humankind¹ and the ants (and other smallish critters) lauded on the Discovery Channel and similar venues for their strength and agility,² I have become jaded to the exploits of these insects.

While fact-checking Sunday’s post, Autodidactic Videophilia 101, about UC Berkeley’s courses and lectures offered on video, however, I happened onto an unrelated press release from that school containing ant info that did catch my attention. The key paragraph from the article follows:

Biologists clocked the speed at which the trap-jaw ant, Odontomachus bauri, closes its mandibles at 35 to 64 meters per second, or 78 to 145 miles per hour - an action they say is the fastest self-powered predatory strike in the animal kingdom. The average duration of a strike was a mere 0.13 milliseconds, or 2,300 times faster than the blink of an eye.

Perhaps it’s the testosterone talking, but I must say that the phrase, “the fastest self-powered predatory strike in the animal kingdom” does quicken the pulse.

And there’s more

The phenomenal mandible acceleration allows the ant to propel itself through the air. The integrative biology folks at Berkeley have identified at least two different jumps:

1. The Bouncer Defense which occurs “when the ant, either alone or in a group, approaches and strikes a large intruder with its jaws, it is simultaneously catapulted away from the trespasser, perhaps leaving behind a crippled victim in the process” and moves the ant primarily in a horizontal axis over distances up to 39.6 centimeters.

2. The Escape Jump, which is used “when the ant needs to escape quickly from an intruder, it strikes its jaws against the ground to fling itself into the air” and moves the ant primarily in a vertical axis to heights of 8.3 centimeters.

And the article does include the obligatory “If the ant were a 5-foot-6-inch tall human, …” convention. Translated into dimensions proportionate to that 5-foot-6-inch human, the ant can reach “a height of 44 feet and a horizontal distance of 132 feet.”³


The full - and fully fascinating - article (1 page) can be found at
~Ant jaws break speed record, propel insects into air, biologists find~

Not-to-be-missed videos of the jumps & a close-up of the mandibles clamping together can be viewed at
~Ant Jumps Video~

Footnotes

1. Traditional, non-cartoon movie ants fall into one of three categories: aliens, specimens altered by radioactivity, or genetic mutants. While one might think that statistically, one of the races of alien-ants, especially those advanced enough to be flitting through hyper-space, would, as they say, come in peace, or one of the forces such as radiation or laboratory accident that caused alterations to Earth ants would result in super-strength and a gentle disposition. This does not, however, seem to be the case. Movie ants, at least in my experience, are at best amoral killers and some seemed to be downright rotten characters.↩
2. E.g., “If the common picnic ant were the size of a 5-foot-6-inch man, it could juggle the Sears Tower, the Standard Oil Building, and the Wrigley Building while reciting limericks and sonnets composed extemporaneously on themes suggested by members of the audience, after which it would hypnotize volunteers from the audience, causing them to cluck like chickens whenever they heard the name of a Mel Gibson movie.”↩
3. One can only imagine the spectacular feats I could perform were I that ant since I stand a full 6 feet tall. Awesome, eh?↩

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