MALI: If you’re an ant, running into an antlion is as a bad as it sounds. But a team of researchers have figured out that one kind of ant, the trap-jaw ant, has a unique way of escaping the burrowing predator’s clutches: The ants use their mandibles to jump to safety.
Researchers already knew that one species, the Odontomachus brunneus, had particularly powerful jaws that close at an incredible speed. The jaws catch prey, dig in the ground, help to care for larvae, and protect the ant. Researchers knew that, sometimes, the trap-jaws had been known to jump with those jaws, too, presumably in order to escape danger, study co-author Fredrick Larabee said in a statement. “But it was unknown whether this behavior was meant to help them get away from a predator, and it wasn’t clear that it actually improved their odds of surviving an encounter with a predator,” Larabee said.So, does the dramatic jump help? Yes. It doubled the ants’ survival rate.
Researchers placed trap-jaw ants in a sandy test-field, where an antlion was waiting. Antlions — larvae of a dragonfly-like flying insect — dig pits under the sand to form a conical pit of doom that’s quite hard for ants to escape. Sometimes an antlion will fling sand at an ant in order to trigger a little avalanche, pushing the ant closer to its death. Here’s one failed escape.
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