Sahara ant's speed defies belief

There's an ant in the Sahara that runs at 108 times its own body length per second. Scaled up to a human, that's almost 800 kilometres an hour.

It's the Saharan silver ant, Cataglyphis bombycina. The actual ground speed is modest — about 85 centimetres a second — but its body is only 8 millimetres long. In relative terms, nothing else on land moves like this. Cheetahs manage about 16 body lengths per second. Usain Bolt, at peak, did six.

It has to move that fast because the surface of the Sahara reaches 70°C, hot enough to cook the protein in an ant's body within minutes. The silver ant waits inside its nest until the moment the desert is too hot for the lizards that would eat it, then bursts out, sprints across the sand for a few minutes, finds the corpse of an insect that has just died of heat, and sprints home. The entire foraging window is about ten minutes a day.

To survive it, the ant has triangular silver hairs all over its body that reflect sunlight like microscopic mirrors and radiate heat out the underside. It runs on six legs, but at top speed it sometimes lifts to four, galloping like a tiny horse. Its leg muscles fire so fast that all six feet leave the ground at the same instant — the ant is briefly flying.

It also navigates without scent trails. There's no shade, no landmarks, and the sun-baked sand erases pheromones instantly. Instead, the silver ant counts its own steps. Researchers who glued tiny stilts onto returning ants found they overshot the nest by exactly the predicted distance.

There is, in other words, a tiny silver creature crossing the world's deadliest oven by doing mental arithmetic.