A Panamanian famous for its mandible
December 09, 2008
The termites need to store energy to generate enough destructive force
A single hit on the head by the termite Termes panamensis (Snyder), which possesses the fastest mandible strike ever recorded, is sufficient to kill a would-be nest invader, report Marc Seid and Jeremy Niven, STRI post-doctoral fellows working at the Neurobiology Laboratories, and Rudolf Scheffrahn from the University of Florida.
The group is interested in the evolution of termite soldiers' brains and how they employ different types of defensive weaponry," says Seid (in the photo). Footage of the soldier termite's jaws as they strike an invader at almost 70 meters per second was captured on a high speed video camera in the laboratory at 40,000 frames per second. Why are the termites so fast? When insects become small they have difficulty generating forces that inflict damage. "To create a large impact force with a light object you need to reach very high velocities before impact," Niven explains.
"The termites need to store energy to generate enough destructive force. They appear to store the energy in their mandibles but we still don't know how they do this—that's the next question," says Niven. These findings were published on November 25 in Current Biology 18(22): 1049-1050. The international media responded with great interest to this publication.
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