#dracula ant

[bitterestbuggy]

BLEHHH!! MEET ME ON ARTFIGHT, I VILL BE ON TEAM VAMPIRE 🧛🏻🩸

[symbiotic-science]

Dracula ants possess fastest known animal appendage: The snap-jaw

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.

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.

"The high accelerations of Mystrium strikes likely result in high-impact forces necessary for predatory or defensive behaviors," the researchers wrote in a report of their findings in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

"These ants are fascinating as their mandibles are very unusual," said University of Illinois animal biology and entomology professor Andrew Suarez, who led the research with Fredrick J. Larabee, a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History; and Adrian A. Smith, of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University, Raleigh. "Even among ants that power-amplify their jaws, the Dracula ants are unique: Instead of using three different parts for the spring, latch and lever arm, all three are combined in the mandible."

Unlike trap-jaw ants, whose powerful jaws snap closed from an open position, Dracula ants power up their mandibles by pressing the tips together, spring-loading them with internal stresses that release when one mandible slides across the other, similar to a human finger snap, the researchers said.

[fpsvoltage]

Dracula ant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adetomyrma_venatrix

[reallyweirdrealworld]

Blood, Bees and Bone: These 5 Animals Have Surprising Diets

Some real creatures have evolved weird appetites...

I think a (mostly) vegetarian spider is the weirdest!

[grossvampire]

hey does anyone know if there are any books about Dracula Ants ? Google just keeps sending me to articles or essays with like one page on them ;__;

[100xinsane-blog]

The Fastest Animal on Earth: the Snap-Jaw Ant

[calosoma-amitch]

Apologies for the delay of posts; I’ve been ill with the flu and am getting back into the swing of things. So here’s a very belated MICROSCOPE MONDAY for you.

Dracula ant (Stigmatomma pallipes), Newark DE. August 2016. Microscope photo courtesy of T Hagerty. 

Although widespread in the US, this ant is rarely encountered, as their small colonies (<60 workers) spend the entirety of their lives underground. Small and functionally blind, these ants are still formidable hunters, preying on soil centipedes, grubs, and other soft-bodied larva that wander into their territory. 

The name “Dracula ant” comes from the way by which they feed on their prey, which are paralyzed by their very large stinger. The serrated mandibles clamp down on wriggling larva, and the toothed clypeus saws through the exoskeleton so that they can drink up the insect’s haemolymph, or “blood”. How these ants haven’t made it into a monster movie is beyond me. 

[ticike]