Do bugs take fall damage?
In: Biology
Because of the [square-cube law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law), insects have a lower terminal velocity and much higher strength to weight ratio than bigger creatures.
These two combined make them bascally immune to damage from falling or flying into things
No because miniscule mass relative to surface area results in a very low terminal velocity. They literally cant fall fast enough to hurt themselves (unless thrown)
No, they do not. The reason for this is that their little bodies have so little mass relative to air resistance they hit the ground harmlessly. In addition, insects are covered in natural deformable body armor made of chitin.
No, for the most part.
To have a significant and definitive answer you would have to drop a lot of bugs from a lot of different heights onto a lot of different surfaces.
We’ve dropped a lot of bugs and recorded the results so we know some stuff. We know that it is close to impossible for very tiny bugs to get hurt at all from any fall. They reach their top falling speed in very little time so dropping them from 20 meters or a 1000 meters won’t make any difference, both bugs will hit the ground at the same speed and will not be hurt.
Some bugs have very long limbs that can get hurt even from falls. Some larger grasshoppers have shown signs of leg injuries after falls, although big grasshoppers are still not very heavy their super long hind legs are more susceptible to getting hurt from sudden impacts that wouldn’t be strong enough to cause harm to the rest of the grasshopper.
So some bugs can get unlucky,
I couldn’t find any info of people dropping the largest bugs, like goliath beetles. But given that they can reach weights of 100 grams it wouldn’t be smart to assume that they could escape injury the way a 0.001 gram ant would.
Latest Answers