Scientist Captures Incredible 1,000fps Close-Up of Ants Injecting Venom

An ant’s stinger is thinner than the width of a human hair, and made up of a main stinger and two “lancets” that actively drill into you as they release venom. We know this because of the incredible footage of this process that was recently captured for the very first time in super-slow motion.

The footage above was shot at 1,000fps while two different species of ant stung a thin wax film. It was captured by Dr. Adrian Smith in the Evolutionary Biology & Behavior Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and it shows a level of detail that is both scientifically enlightening and just plain cool to watch.

You can see how the main stinger inserts into the film, after which the lancets extend outward one after the other, drilling deeper into the skin while releasing a drop of venom with each extension.

Before this, nobody had ever captured this process in anything resembling this level of detail, because the stinger is so small and the movement of each lancet happens faster than the blink of an eye. But at 1,000fps, the entire process becomes cinematically clear.

(via Science)