BLINK and you miss it. A lowly termite, Termes panamensis, snaps its jaws at a speed that tops any other muscle-powered movement on Earth.
By filming the termite’s jaws at 40,000 frames per second, Marc Seid and Jeremy Niven of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama showed that they achieved a speed of 70.4 metres per second – albeit over a distance of only 1.76 millimetres.
Threatened by an intruder, the termite jams its mouthparts against each other using four sets of muscles so big that they fill half the space inside the insect’s head. The pent-up force is…
