Fastest creature in the world...
Not a cheetah, the dracula ant, whose jaws snap shut at phenomenal 200mph
MEET the fastest animal on Earth – and it is not a cheetah.
The dracula ant can snap its jaws at 200mph, which is 5,000 times faster than the blink of an eye and 1,000 times faster than the snap of a finger.
The tiny creature, just a few millimetres in size, has been named the fastest moving living animal, beating the cheetah, whose record running speed is 60mph.
Dracula ants, found in africa, australia and south-east asia, push their jaws together to build up tension before they spring apart. The force created is strong enough to knock out the centipedes the ants hunt so they can drag them back to their nest to feed to their young. They also use it when fighting rival ants.
while they are less headlinegrabbing than cheetahs, invertebrates such as termites and ants have the fastest movements in the animal kingdom because of their spring-loaded jaws.
US scientists used cutting-edge video technology to confirm that the dracula ant is the very fastest.
Professor andrew Suarez, a coauthor of the research from the University of illinois, said: ‘Their powerful jaws are very unusual and work like a mousetrap.
‘The ants use this motion to smack other arthropods, likely stunning them, smashing them against a tunnel wall or pushing them away.’
Dracula ants are known as ‘snapjaw’ ants. Many ants are ‘trap-jaw’ ants, which means that they slam their jaws shut to eat insects.
But snap-jaw ants instead slide one part of their jaw across the other in a motion that takes only 23 millionths of a second. The findings were published in the journal royal Society Open Science.
‘Smack other arthropods’