It’s so quick that should a toad set its eyes on a trap-jaw and fire its tongue, the ant can launch itself clear out of danger before the tongue can fully unravel out of the toad’s face.

Here’s how it works. Moving at speeds thousands of times faster than the blink of an eye, the spring-loaded jaws of a trap-jaw ant catch the insect's prey by surprise and can also launch the ant ...

A member of the Myrmoteras genus of trap-jaw ants, with mandibles deployed. Steve Shattuck Imagine you’re crawling along the forest floor, idly searching for a bit of fungus to chow down on ...

New details about trap-jaw ants Date: May 9, 2017 Source: North Carolina State University Summary: Trap-jaw ants, with their spring-loaded jaws and powerful stings, are among the fiercest insect ...

The trap-jaw ant is famous for its super-strong mandibles, which can crush prey, handle eggs, defend nests from intruders, and even fling the insect into the air. Now, scientists have found that ...

view more Researchers have revealed how an ant's trap-jaw - a powerful, ultrafast and complex evolutionary trait - evolved from a simpler ancestral jaw mechanism The study found that the trap-jaw ...

Trap-jaw ants can slam their jaws together with extraordinary speed, with the tips of their mandibles racing at up to roughly 120 miles per hour. How they could perform such attacks, repeatedly ...

Suarez and his colleagues focused on the trap-jaw ant, Odontomachus bauri. Since the 1800s, researchers had seen these ants zing through the air based on the power of their incredibly strong jaws.

For 60 years, scientists have known that one species of small, rust-colored ant known as Formica archboldi likes to decorate its nests with skulls, or head cases, of several kinds of trap-jaw ants.

It's not much to look at in the beginning. This is the first larval phase of a trap-jaw ant emerging from its egg. New research published in the journal Myrmecology News finds that trap-jaw ants ...

Bug lovers are leading ant walks through parks and gardens so they don’t miss or squish the teeny world crawling by.

"Different trap-jaw ants have very fast jaws to accomplish similar tasks, but this group has evolved them in a completely independent way." Myrmoteras ants live in the tropics of Southeast Asia ...