The Insect World

If you'll recall much earlier in the semester we talked about the recent research showing the gold medal for the fastest mandible strike in nature goes to trap-jaw ants (video).

Now it seems my friend Marc Seid and his colleagues have found a termite has bested the record!

As Marc is quoted :

"Ultimately, we're interested in the evolution of termite soldiers' brains and how they employ different types of defensive weaponry," says Seid. Footage of the soldier termite's jaws as they strike an invader at almost 70 meters per second was captured on a high speed video camera in the laboratory at 40,000 frames per second. "Many insects move much faster than a human eye can see so we knew that we needed high speed cameras to capture their behavior, but we weren't expecting anything this fast. If you don't know about the behavior, you can't hope to understand the brain," Seid adds.

There is always a faster gun out their in the Wild West in the insect world....


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