I've been filming ants flying off of this platform for the last week or so mostly because it looks awesome.
But it turns out that no one's actually filmed ants in slow motion flying like this before.
There's actually been one other study of ant flight and in it
they did make slow motion videos.
But, they are of tethered fire ants. So, they glued fire ants to a tether and analyzed their wing beats.
They found that those ants flap their wings up to 83 times a second. And it was surprising to me that there was only one
study of ant flight behavior because it's relatively easy to film it.
If you take a male ant out of its colony and set it on a little platform like this, it will immediately fly off.
So, this video isn't gonna have very many scientific results. This video is all about the first step in science, observation.
I'm gonna visualize in flight in a way
no one has before, but watch till the end because that's where I'm putting all the weird videos I captured. All the ant bloopers.
The ants I'm filming are male trap-jaw ants. With an orange body and tiny heads, males
look nothing like the workers. In nests like this
they hang on the ceilings of the chambers and avoid interacting with other colony members.
They're only around during mating season to fly out of the nest and mate with new queens.
The first thing I noticed was this right when they take off they sort of extend their legs to front legs in a Superman pose
right during liftoff and into flight.
This pose doesn't seem to be just a trap-jaw ant thing either. Other ants I've filmed, like these aphaenogaster ants, they stretch out
their legs during liftoff and in flight too.
The next cool part has to do with the wings themselves.
They have a fore and hind wing that can move independently, but during flight they flap in unison.
However, during some of the takeoff sequences the wings are actually separated and moving out of sync.
At a certain point the fore wing slams into the hind wing the two become locked together.
The mechanism here is surprisingly simple. On the top edge of the hind wing
there are seven hooks that grab the fore wing and actually link the two. I had to look this up
but there's actually an anatomical term for these hooks on insect wings. They're called hamuli.
The way the ants oriented their bodies during takeoff was also pretty interesting. Some takeoffs were pretty smooth with just wing flapping and forward flight.
But some of the flights started with a head tilt and a sideways roll.
The most extreme takeoff I filmed was an Aphaenogaster male who lifted off into a completely inverted flight.
These odd takeoff seems similar to what fruit fly researchers have described as "escape takeoffs" which are faster but less
stabilized than usual.
Okay, now for the weird videos. In this first one the ant sort of stands up like he's gonna fly, raises
his front legs, but then all of a sudden
seems to forget to flap his wings and just kind of belly flops right on the platform.
This last one might qualify as one of the greatest ant videos films of all time.
Flight starts out good, stands up, flaps its wings, liftoff is great. Then all of a sudden just sort of gives up on life.
And he's gone. We got to reverse that watch it again. It's pretty great. Here we go liftoff and then nevermind.
So that's what ant flight looks like up close and in slow motion.
Now there's an estimated
20,000 species of ants and I just showed you video of two.
So there's tons left out there to observe and there's probably even more interesting things to film than what I just showed you.
So if you study insect biomechanics and want to study insect flight or ant flight
send me a note I can send you these raw files.
Otherwise if you're interested in other videos like this and seeing other cool
stories about what's happening in this lab subscribe to this channel and check out the other videos that we put out!