This is Scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Suzanne Bard.

The Sahara Desert, where daytime temperatures can

survive in this harsh environment,

but an insect called the Sahara silver ant thrives.

They scurry out onto the sand from their protected nests

to gather up the carcasses of less fortunate insects that have died from the heat.

The hotter the day, the more insect bodies they will find, the more food they have.

Sarah Pfeffer, an animal behaviorist at Ulm University in Germany.

She says that to avoid sinking into the Sahara sand dunes, where they could meet the same fate as their lunch,

Silver Ants have to be fast. To document just how quickly the ants move,

Pfeffer and her colleagues set up high-speed cameras above a channel between the

entrance to the hungry ants nest and a food source. The researchers recorded

top speeds approaching 35 inches per second.

But if you really look how the animals are and you calculate the body length

per second, you come up with a walking speed that is an astonishing 108 body length per second.

That figure makes them the fastest known ant on the planet.

By comparison, Cheetas top out at about 16 body lengths per second.

The videos revealed how the ants achieve such prodigious speeds.

As they accelerate, their leg movements become synchronized.

They increase their stride length by bringing all six feet off the sand at once, which Pfeffer describes as a gallop.

Really all legs are listed from the ground, they are in air, but it's not jumping.

It's a very smooth run that they have.

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