Trap-Jaw Ants Risk Blowing Themselves Apart When They Hunt. Here's Why They Don't

It might be a good idea to have a bear trap strapped to your head when you're small and on the hunt for fast- moving prey.

It's all fun until it actually happens. Your face could go into your back pocket if that trap's arcs were to wobble.

The trap-jaw ant has a solution to this problem, which makes it one of the fastest snapping animals.

The mathematical modeling on the head of the trap-jaw ant species Odontomachus brunneus was done by a group of US researchers.

The ant's mandibles are relatively simple spring-powered levers, each locked in place by alatch that's primed to release the moment prey tickles a hair-trigger mustache

Itty-bitty crawlies are known to have latched-mediated spring actuation. As biology shrinks, elastic energy scales far more efficiently than complex biochemical motor, which puts a spring in the step of all kinds of insects.

It is too much of a good thing that the forces of a tiny LaMSA can risk overpowering the materials holding it all together.

The Mystrium camillae is also known as the vampire ant. It can swing its mouth parts shut at speeds of over 200 miles per hour.

It deserves a silver medal for an even more impressive 196 kilometers per hour. It rotates each mandible at an equivalent of 470,000rpm to grab its prey in a matter of seconds.

The jaws are able to carry young and other materials with great dexterity.

Researchers were forced to film the ants at high speed in order to get a better idea of what was happening in that blink of movement.

"When we played back the videos in slow- motion, their strikes were spectacularly precise," says Duke University biologists.

The mandibles kept a perfect arcs for the first 65 degrees before decelerating. The ant's head was pulled out of shape as the mandibles closed.

The whole head was storing elastic potential energy.

The energy for half of the swing was due to the warping of the exoskeleton. The other half was supplied by a huge muscle in the head.

The muscles on the inside of the ant's head hold the mandibles in place.

The front of the mandible is pushed by the ant's head as it snaps back into shape.

If it was found in other insects, the researchers wouldn't be surprised. Future research could show how common it is for people to make movements quickly and precisely.

This knowledge can be useful in our engineering because it can help us strike the right balance between speed and precision.

If you wear bear traps on your face, it's a bad idea.

The research was published in a journal.