Does ants feel pain when they fall from heights. I saw an ants fell from second floor and she started walking like nothing happened. Now I am curious about this.
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Ants are very small and light, so they’ll quickly reach terminal velocity. Height doesn’t matter so much since it can be reached quickly, and they won’t hit the ground that hard since it isn’t very fast. They also have a much higher strength-to-weight ratio than we do, so the rapid stop on impact is less likely to hurt them.
They don’t get hurt no matter how far they fall. Compared to their tiny mass they have a pretty large area, so they feel a lot of drag when falling. They never get as fast as a human would. If we would fall as slow as ants we could just walk away, too.
In addition, smaller animals are generally stronger relative to their mass and ants are no exception. A human muscle might have to move an arm or a leg that is somewhere from half a meter to one meter long. An ant muscle only needs to move something 1-2 millimeters long, which is much easier.
Imagine you are heavy and falling underwater. You fall so slow that it doesn’t hurt, doesn’t matter how high. Not the same but kinda like that.
Most small creatures do not weigh enough relative to their size to reach a terminal velocity that can cause them harm when they land.
ELI5 how did you see the ant falling from the second floor and it walking away after landing? If you were standing on the second floor, how did you see that it was okay after it, if you were standing on the ground how did you know that it was falling from the second floor?
There are two sources of injury from falling: the impact from the fall, and what happens to your body when one part of it stops while the rest still has lots of kinetic energy left to shed.
In other words, let’s say you fall from a height of 10 meters and land on your feet. You might break your heels on impact, but now your feet have stopped moving but your upper legs, torso, arms, and head are still coming down. If they’ve got enough kinetic energy, you can break bones in your legs or suffer spinal damage. Your internal organs can be bruised or ruptured as their own weight along with the weight of any organs above them bears down and applies pressure to them.
Ants don’t have heavy bodies that compress and fail under their own weight in a fall. And as others have mentioned, they don’t fall fast enough for the impact itself to be a concern.
A feather and a watermelon fall from the same height. The watermelon explodes, because it weighed a lot and that weight carried a lot of energy. It also had a lot of momentum, which pushes the air out of the way, allowing it to fall faster.
The feather is so light, air itself is enough to slow it down as it falls. It carries little energy to begin with, and lands without breaking anything.
We are watermelons, ants are feathers.
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