At what point do small bugs take damage from falling?

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I released a spider today and after launching it from about six feet up, which was about 72 times its height, I started to wonder about this.

EDIT: Took out a typo. I didn’t think anybody would care or notice but you know, Reddit.

In: Biology

21 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

They don’t. Their terminal velocities are too low. They just won’t hit the ground from falling hard enough to cause damage.

Terminal velocity is the max. speed you’ll hit the ground at if dropped. It’s determined by things such as gravity, air pressure, shape and density of the dropped body.

Might be different if the wind blows them into something.

In fact, things like spiders, ants, etc are found floating in the air. Like, plane flying altitudes.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Some can take no damage. This is due to an exoskeleton in some bugs. It’s also due to the [square-cube law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law). Bones and muscles increase in strength based on their cross-sectional area. This increases at a rate proportional to the length squared. Mass, by contrast, increases at a rate proportional to the length cubed. This means that as bones and muscles get larger, their strength is increasing slower than their mass. For bugs, the strength to weight ratio is much, much better than in humans. Most bugs have a terminal velocity (the fastest speed the object can fall on Earth due to air resistance) much slower than would be required to damage the bug.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If you dropped a squirrel, a person, and an elephant of the Empire State Building, the squirrel would be fine, the person would shatter every bone in their body and die, and the elephant would explode. Bigger things hit the ground harder, smaller things hit the ground lighter.

Anonymous 0 Comments

While this question is marked with a biology tag the answer really is more about physics. Lightweight objects tend to have slow terminal velocity. A bug isn’t very dense.

Now, in a vacuum, on the other hand, the answer would be different, assuming you could find a bug that doesn’t need air to live and wouldn’t just die from the vacuum alone.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

They don’t. They are so light that their terminal velocity (the fastest they can fall due to air resistance) is lower than the speed it would require to hurt them. You can drop an ant from a sky scraper and it would be pretty much fine. There is such little mass that the forces they feel when hitting the ground can’t really do significant damage.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Spiders can and absolutely do rupture their carapace and die from falling. Just the smaller they are the less likely.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Probably never. Wind resistance stops them from getting any appreciable speed no matter how high you put them.

Consider instead a piece of fluff or a sheet of paper. How high do you need to drop it before it will take fall damage? Well, doesn’t matter, it isn’t aerodynamic enough to fall fast enough to get significantly hurt.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Since i saw everyone say terminal velocity but noone explain it:

Terminal velocity is the maximum speed at which a given object falls. It is determined by the objects weight and drag coefficient.

The reason is that an object gets accelerated by gravity. While falling, it also experienced drag. However, drag is based on speed aswell. The faster you go, the faster the drag rises. At a certain point the drag and gravitational acceleration are equal and the object cannot fall any faster.

In terms of calculating this, the hard part is figuring out an objects drag coefficient and its actual relevant surface area

Anonymous 0 Comments

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