These Are the Best Ants Seriously Harpegnathos saltator

This is one spectacular ant. It's called an Indian jumping ant. Its scientific name is harpingnathus saltator, and here, when it gets a little tap on the back, you'll see why it's called a jumping ant. There are only a few types of ants that can use their legs to jump, and for my money, none of them are as cool as these. So one of the reasons these ants jump is for prey capture. They're a predatory species, and if you wave one of their favorite foods in front of them, in this case a cricket, they'll leap up and grab it kind of like a dog jumping up to get its favorite chew toy. Now this species only occurs in India and a couple other places in Southeast Asia, but I was able to film it about a month ago when I visited Arizona State University. This is the lab where I did my graduate research close to 20 years ago. Kevin, who you see here, has been working in this lab and keeping these ants in colony for as many years. They were one the first ant species to have their genome sequenced, and they've become a model organism for studying social behavior. What Kevin and I were most interested in recording was good close-up footage of prey capture and stinging. As you're about to see, I think we were successful in being able to capture some interesting shots. If you look at the head of the ant, you can see how huge her eyes are. Once she visually assesses the cricket as a prey item, she stalks up on it and Once she has the prey in her grip, the next thing to do is sting. The venom will paralyze the cricket and allow her to carry it back to the nest to feed to the larvae. One thing you'll notice here is that the stinger doesn't seem to come out until the ant can bring the tip of its abdomen into direct contact with the prey. Of course, I shot all this close-up footage in slow motion so we could see these details, but to show you what all this looks like in real time, here's what you would see if you were watching this happen in a lab nest. Watch this ant here, which is about to attack the cricket right in front of it. The pounce is nearly instantaneous, and after a little repositioning, the ant goes in for the sting. Inside the nest, the larvae feed directly on the prey. Here you can see several larvae all munching on a single cricket leg at the same time. Okay, back to the slow motion footage. One thing that surprised me was seeing just how much probing was happening when they're stinging the crickets. It's not just a quick jab and injection of venom. Instead, it looks like they feel around and reposition the stinger. Maybe they're trying to hit a particular spot, like the ventral nerve cord in their prey. This is my favorite shot of them all. You can see the ant feel with the tip of its abdomen before actually inserting the stinger. The ant pushes and maneuvers the flexible end abdominal segments before settling on the right orientation. If I zoom the shot in, and if you look here, you can actually see a faint black line appear inside the cricket. That's the ant's stinger as it probes through the fatty tissue, injecting venom. I'll reverse the footage and play it back a couple times here so you can make sure and spot it. It's pretty neat to see how long the stinger is and how far it reaches inside the cricket prey. In this shot, the ant finishes venom injection and retracts the stinger out of the cricket. When it pulls away the abdomen, the stinger is almost all the way back inside the ant. She then uncurls from that stinging position and is ready to carry the cricket back to the nest. Now to get these shots at eye level to the ants, I had to film this on an elevated platform so that the lens was even with the action. But after successfully capturing insect prey on the set, the ants were eager to find a way off and to bring their captures back to their nest. So that's how I ended up getting this shot. Carrying a cricket that's probably at least as heavy or maybe even more than her own body weight, this worker performs a shockingly agile and high-flying leap to escape the platform with her prey. Now earlier in the video, I said that Harpingnathus is just one of a few ants that can jump. So here's a side-by-side comparison with another famous jumping ant, Giganteops destructor. Both ants use their middle and hind legs to power their jumps, but Giganteops also swings its abdomen up in the direction of the jump to add momentum to the takeoff. Like Harpingnathus, Giganteops are visually oriented ants. They use their jumps to navigate through their environment. Check out an older video on this channel if you want to learn more about this species. So there's a bunch more I could say about how interesting these ants are, but I'll leave you instead with a recommendation to read more about them in this book, The Superorganism by Hull, Dubler, and Wilson. There's about a 20-page section in it about them, and it also puts their biology into context with other ant species. Okay, that's it for now. Thanks for watching!