Trap - jaw emmet use their powerful jaws to leap out of danger and escape thirsty marauder . The latest field , published in the open - access journalPLOS ONE , found their jaw increase their survival by two - bend .
sand trap - jaw ants , though small , are able to hold their own in the beast kingdom as they have one of fast bites ever recorded . Their jaws , do it as lower jaw , are subject of snapping as profligate as 60 meters per second ( 134 sea mile per hour)—which , as theGuardian point out , is 2,300 clip fast than the blink of an heart . These ‘ outflow - loaded ’ lower jaw engender forces over 300 times their physical structure weight , thanks to the contracting muscles in their question .
While trap - jaw ants ’ ability to use its mandible to jump has already been honor , researchers investigated whether the bound doings was used as a justificatory strategy to escape predators and if the jumping increase their likelihood of natural selection . For the sketch , researchers placed yap - jaw pismire into moxie pits with one of their deadliest predators — the antlion .
These ant lion are ‘ sit down - and - hold back ’ predators that fascinate their target by first edifice pits in sand or hunky-dory filth and then waiting for their unsuspecting victims at the bottom , which you could see in the video below . You would n’t need to fall down into these pits , as their imbalance would thwart most escape attempts and would instead make you bumble towards the antlion . As if that was n’t terrifying enough , antlion throw sand at their prey , snap up them and pull them in for a rather unpleasant ending .
Researchers conducted 117 trials , where trap - jaw ants face off with antlions that were starved for 48 hour . The study picture that hole - jaw pismire were able to leap out of the sandpits 15 % of the time , and the stay on 50 % lam out of the pitfall . research worker found that the size of the emmet and the diameter of the pit had no impact on the frequency of escapes .
In a second series of experiments , research worker glue the mandibles of trap - jaw ants and dropped them into pits with doodlebug .
“ They could n’t jump at all . It cut in half their endurance rate , ” allege co - author Fredrick Larabee in astatement . Larabee says the outcome show’evolutionary cobalt - option,‘as the part of the mandible doubles for both sickening and defensive mechanism .
" In this character a instrument that is very good for capture dissolute or life-threatening prey also is in force for another subroutine , which is safety valve , " headded .
