The Michael Phelps of the ant world

摘要

Ants don't look like natural swimmers. But the trap-jaw ant can swim ten times as fast as Olympic champion Michael Phelps, relative to its body size. Steve Yanoviak of the University of Louisville in Kentucky took 35 tropical ant species, from forests that sometimes flood, and dropped them into water to see how they coped. Ten species could swim well, covering more than three times their body length a second. Michael Phelps covers roughly his height each second. Trap-jaw ants (Odontomachus bauri) were some of the fastest. They average 1 centimetre in length, yet swim at more than 10 centimetres a second (Journal of Experimental Biology, DOI: 10.1242/jeb.101600).