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A land-speed record for ants set in Saharan dunes

World’s fastest ants zip along at 85 centimetres per second, at times with all 6 legs off the ground at once.
Footage of a Saharan silver ant (Cataglyphis bombycina) running, at 44x slow motion.

A Saharan silver ant’s pace seems leisurely — but only because the footage has been slowed by a factor of 44. Credit: Sarah Pfeffer

Saharan silver ants have to be fast: they routinely sprint across burning desert sands in the midday heat to search for food. But now Sarah Pfeffer at Ulm University in Germany and her colleagues have shown that these tiny insects (Cataglyphis bombycina) are the fastest ants alive, attaining blistering speeds of 0.855 metres — 108 times their body length — in one second.

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Nature 574, 457 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03124-z

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