In the dunes outside Douz, Tunisia, researchers laid down a sand runway, baited it with mealworms, and filmed what happened with a high-speed camera. What they caught was the fastest ant ever recorded.
The Saharan silver ant covers 108 times its own body length every second. In absolute terms that's a modest 855 mm per second (2.8 feet) — but absolute speed is the wrong way to measure a creature the size of a grain of rice. Measured properly, against its own body, almost nothing on legs comes close.
For comparison, relative speed in body lengths per second:
- Saharan silver ant: 108
- Australian tiger beetle: 171 — one of the very few faster
- Cheetah: about 16
- Usain Bolt, flat out: 6.2
Scale that up to a human and the numbers stop making sense. A person moving at the ant's relative pace would be travelling somewhere around 700 km/h (435 mph) — faster than a passenger jet at cruising altitude.
It manages this on legs shorter than its slower desert cousins'. The trick is stride rate: up to 47 strides a second, legs swinging at 1,300 mm per second, the six feet moving in two alternating tripods. Above about 300 mm/s the ant is effectively galloping, with all six feet off the ground at once — probably to stop it sinking into loose sand.
And it does all this in the worst conditions imaginable. It forages at midday, on sand well above 50 °C (122 °F), because that's when its predators shelter. Its silver coat is made of triangular hairs that reflect sunlight and infrared to keep it from cooking. Even so, it can only survive outside its nest for around ten minutes a day.
An honest note on records: it isn't the fastest animal alive by relative speed. A Californian mite (377) and that Australian tiger beetle both beat it. But among ants, nothing is close — and it earns the title in the least survivable place on Earth to attempt it.
Ten minutes a day, flat out, on burning sand. That's the entire life of the fastest ant there is.