Trap-jaw ants have large mandibles that spring shut incredibly quickly, at speeds above 130 mph, generating a force 300 times greater than their body weight. They've adapted this ability to escape ...

Trap-jaw ants have long been a source of fascination for Fred Larabee, a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and lead author of a cutting-edge paper on ...

Here’s how it works. Trap-jaw ants use a spring-loaded mechanism to release their mandibles at insane speeds. (Image credit: Reproduced with permission of The Company of Biologists.

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.

The trap-jaw ant has a won notorious reputation in the insect kingdom for its super-strong, spring-loaded mandibles, which it uses to crush prey with ease and defend its nests.

They let O. brunneus trap-jaw ants skid down the sandy sides of traps dug by a predatory insect called an ant lion (SN: 7/12/14, p. 4).

(CN) — Like something out of an Aesop fable, researchers recorded the fastest-ever acceleration of a resettable animal movement in a humble ant. Thanks to specialized muscles in their trap-like jaws, ...

The jaw-snapping jumps have been observed in three types of ants too, Odontomachus, Anochetus (Ponerinae), and Strumigenys (Myrmicinae), Sorger writes. The trap-jaw ant, Odontomachus, can be found ...

Some species of trap-jaw ants use their spring-loaded mandibles to hurl themselves out of harm's way when an ant-trapping predator stalks, researchers report in the journal PLOS ONE. This dramatic ...

In fact, some species of trap-jaw ants can snap their jaws shut at speeds faster than 196.9 feet per second (60 meters per second), making it one of the fastest animal movements ever recorded, the ...

It is thought the Florida ants eat the trap-jaw ants—the body parts left over are normally hollowed out. Florida's skull-collecting ant, Formica archboldi, next to trap-jaw ant body parts.