Does the snap of a trap-jaw ant hurt?

recently I've put out a video about snap Giants who move their mandibles faster than any other ant on earth or any other animal and someone in the comments wrote could this sever my finger the answer to that question is no here's actually what a snapshot ant versus a finger would look like but I appreciate the question I get asked that a lot in response to these ants these are one of my primary study organisms these trap-jaw ants of the genus Adana MacOS they also have spring-loaded jaws and when they're released they snap shut at speeds averaging 41 meters per second or about 90 miles an hour and it does seem like something moving at 90 miles an hour even if it's an ant would hurt if it hits you so to capture what a man will snap against a finger would look like I've got this set up here in the ant room this is a high-speed camera and it's got a macro lens attached to it so we're gonna film this up close and in super slow motion the camera is gonna capture at 3200 frames per second and it's all gonna happen here on this tiny little platform so we're gonna put the ant on the platform so her movement is restricted and then I'll just set my finger at the end and hopefully she'll find it and snap and everything will be in focus and it'll work out so you can see the mandible strike doesn't do anything to my fingertip I can feel it but just barely but a snap does generate enough force to send the ant flying back away from my finger here are the two frames in the shot where the jaws go from open to closed what you've seen is 312 microseconds are less than 1/3 thousandths of a second to actually capture mandible movement snaps have to be filmed at a frame rate of at least 60,000 frames per second because the mandibles are accelerating that over 1.5 million meters per second squared which is roughly how fast a bullet would accelerate in the barrel of a gun however force is a product of mass and acceleration and in this case the mass of the things that are accelerating the mandibles is super super small jeffchang mandibles are hollow and the weight of a single mandible is 0.07 milligrams which is about the weight of a single grain of salt so in this case even though the mandibles are being swung really quickly their tiny mass limits how much force they can actually generate while on a human scale the forces might not be that great on an ant scale an animal strikes are explosive the estimated force from the strike of just one of the two moving mandibles is four hundred times greater than the ants own bodyweight or about 3.08 grams of force trap jaws like these actually used strikes against objects or their environment as an escape mechanism launching themselves several body lengths away from danger so against the tough skin thing like a fingertip mandible strikes are deflected but against smaller soft bodied insects these strikes can be deadly for instance here's footage I captured at 225,000 frames per second of a mandible strike landing on the abdomen of a termite okay so that's what a man will strike against a finger looks like it doesn't hurt I should mention that these ants do have a pretty powerful sting which does hurt so they're not completely harmless to us and I guess the other take-home message from this video is if you ask question in the comments I might just spend a month thinking about it and then make a video in response to it so if you have questions about this or any other thing about these ants in here leave them in the comments and we'll see what happens

Channel: Ant Lab

Views: 1,997,035

Rating: 4.94245 out of 5

Keywords: trap-jaw ant, trap-jaw, ant, mandible strike, mandible snap, spring-loaded, ant bite, ant sting, odontomachus, odontomachus brunneus, ant vs finger, ant vs. finger, snap-jaw ant, biomechanics, animal physics, animal biology, entomology, social insect, biology, animal behavior, mandible, ant jaw, high-speed video, macro video, insect photography, phantom camera, phantom miro, bug, bugs, bug video

Id: H2okI6ZszQY

Length: 4min 33sec (273 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2019