
Dracula ants possess fastest known animal appendage: the snap-jaw - DoreenMichele
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-12/uoia-dap120618.php
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pathsjs
Well, how this compares to the
[http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp)
?

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aesh2Xa1
The authors mention the mantis shrimp in the first sentence. So, presumably,
the ant is faster.

>CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Move over, trap-jaw ants and mantis shrimp: There's a
faster appendage in town. According to a new study, the Dracula ant, Mystrium
camillae, can snap its mandibles at speeds of up to 90 meters per second (more
than 200 mph), making it the fastest animal movement on record.

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pathsjs
Uh, sorry, I don't know how I could have missed that!

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ogig
Trap-jaw ants do this funny catapult thing: When they close their jaws at
those speeds against an inamovible object... see yourself:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52XZ_zjl1ck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52XZ_zjl1ck)

edit: A better image example
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lw3-kCBx50&t=9%3A41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lw3-kCBx50&t=9%3A41)

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gammateam
Not just 50 feet, 50 LINEAR FEET stop the presses

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Y_Y
Well it's not going to be square feet, unless they splatter when they land.

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accnumnplus1
Anyone have any idea what that would do to a human finger, a demonstration of
which was sadly missing from the video?

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scott_s
I have _some_ idea. I think the force of impact would be between 1 Newton and
10 Newton. That's saying the mass involved is between 0.001 g (typical mass of
an ant) and 0.0001 g (because I don't know how much of the ant's actual mass
is involved). The paper cites 10^6 g as roughly the top acceleration, which
yields roughly between 1 N and 10 N of force. That's roughly between the
weight of an apple and a 1 kg object. So, not much.

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lbj
tldr; Jaw snap at 200mph which at this scale is comparable to warp 10

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newsbinator
I wonder how many times they can do that before the action breaks their
mandible or kills them?

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blattimwind
The usual body-size oriented headline scaling is a fallacy, because energy
relates to mass (be it striking force or metabolism), not length, and mass
scales with volume, and volume scales to the _third power_ of length for
three-dimensional-ish shapes (which are most animals).

So, say, the human arm is perhaps 100 times larger, so the headline-scaled
striking speed would be 9000 m/s. But it is also approximately a million times
heavier. The ant would hit with 0.02 J, the human arm with over 200 MJ, a
punch so strong you could literally stop (and presumably completely destroy)
an airliner in landing approach with one blow.

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solarengineer
Your explanation reminded me of this:
[https://youtu.be/_Qq6dQwLh1s](https://youtu.be/_Qq6dQwLh1s)

