Science news
This Dracula Ant's jaws could make it the fastest animal on the 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 may 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 miles per hour, 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

Взято из New York Times