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Saharan Silver Ant — printable fact sheet
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Saharan Silver Ant
Cataglyphis bombycina
Cataglyphis bombycina is the fastest ant ever measured, clocked at 855 mm per second — about 108 times its own body length every second, which in relative terms beats a cheetah by a huge margin — and it achieves this with a gait so extreme that at full speed all six legs are air…
Did you know?
- Unlike most ants, the Saharan Silver Ant forages almost exclusively during the hottest part of the day, when even its predators—like desert lizards—are forced to seek shelter.
- Researchers glued stilts made of pig bristles onto Cataglyphis ants and cut the legs of others short; the stilted ants overshot the nest and the stumpy ones stopped short, proving the ants literally count their steps as an odometer. The hairs are triangular in cross-section, which is the key to their combined reflectance and emittance, and removing them makes the ant visibly darker and measurably hotter in sunlight. Scouts sit at the nest entrance watching for the lizards to retreat, and the whole colony's foraging window opens only when the last lizard has gone.
What I learned
Draw the saharan silver ant
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