What do you think of this fact?
Most desert animals hide when the Sahara is at its hottest. The Saharan silver ant (Cataglyphis bombycina) does the opposite: it leaves its nest at midday and sprints across the sand.
Faster than any other ant on record
Biologists from the University of Ulm in Germany filmed silver ants with a high-speed camera at an oasis on the northern edge of the Sahara in Tunisia, luring them onto a sand-dusted runway with mealworms. Top speed: 855 millimeters per second. That’s about 108 body lengths per second, according to their study in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
For comparison, ScienceAlert puts a cheetah at about 16 body lengths per second and Usain Bolt at 6.2. At the ant’s relative speed, Bolt would hit roughly 800 km/h.
The trick isn’t long legs. Silver ants actually have shorter legs than their close relative Cataglyphis fortis. Instead, they take up to 47 strides per second, and at high speeds all six feet leave the ground at once, so the ant is briefly airborne. Each foot touches the sand for as little as 7 milliseconds.
Silver hair as sunscreen
Why the rush? At midday the ground can reach 70 degrees Celsius, while the ant’s critical thermal maximum is 53.6 degrees, as UW News reports. So it spends only a few minutes outside, scavenging insects and other small creatures that died in the heat. Heading out at the hottest time also helps it avoid predatory desert lizards.
Its silvery shine helps too. A team led by Nanfang Yu at Columbia University found in 2015 that the ant’s hairs have a triangular cross section. They reflect visible and near-infrared sunlight and help the ant shed body heat to the sky. Together, this keeps the ant 5 to 10 degrees cooler than it would be without the hair.
Bonus fact: Even the silver ant isn’t the fastest runner among arthropods. ScienceAlert ranks it third in body lengths per second, behind a Californian coastal mite at 322 and an Australian tiger beetle at 170.
So the fastest ant on Earth hunts on a hot plate, wearing a coat that works like a mirror.