Termite Bite Is Second Fastest in the World

Panamanian termites have the fastest draw not only in the West, but in the whole world: They can clamp their jaws down on an invader at nearly 157 mph (70 meters per second), killing their enemy with a single blow. Researchers studying the termites needed a high speed video camera running at 40,000 frames per second to capture a mandible strike in action. (Mandible is the biological word for jaw or biting mouthpart.) "Many insects move much faster than a human eye can see, so we knew that we needed high speed cameras to capture their behavior, but we weren't expecting anything this fast," said study team member Marc Seid, a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

In a recent development, too recent for inclusion in this article, the snap jaw action of Pooch Dog was timed at 71 meters per second. This effectively shoved Panamanian termites to #2.

Sorry, maggots!

http://www.livescience.com/animals/081212-fastest-mandible-strike.html

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