So obviously when you step on an or any other insect it’ll get crunched and die instantly
As a small scale experiment, I had found some ants eating a lollipop that’s some kids have dropped near my front steps, there was a line of ants on the ground as well as ants all over the lollipop
I then proceeded to gently place a penny on top of the thorax of one of the unsuspecting ants that were on the ground, I used my handheld digital microscope to get a closer look
The ant desperately kicked and squirmed under the penny, but the weight of the coin far exceeded what an ant could lift and despite its best efforts, it was unable to get the coin off of it
I left it there for a few minutes, then removed it, and when I did, I could see that the ant had not so much as a scratch on it and it simply ran away unscathed
I also tried something smart which was to lay a small iPad on top of a larger beetle which yielded the same results
How come these bugs can withstand so much pressure on their bodies, at human scale this is like someone placing a 2010 iron disc on someone’s chest, they would surely be crushed to death
In: 12
Pasted from u/AedanValu from a post several years ago:
Multiple reasons:
The exoskeleton of the ant distributes the force more quickly across its entire body (due to being more stiff than fluffy human tissue), protecting more vulnerable parts.
The small size makes it more resistant to blows – this is because volume (and mass) scales faster than surface area (r3 instead of r2). So smaller objects have a larger surface area per unit mass, which makes them move more easily even with light forces (like wind). The mass is what causes inertia (“pushing back” against your finger while you apply the force) and the force is distributed over its surface area. So your applied force is distributed across a relatively large (compared to its volume) surface area (leading to a relatively low pressure), while the low mass (very low, due to aforementioned scaling) makes it easy to move. This means you won’t be applying your force for more than a fraction of a second before the ant is moving along with your finger, no longer receiving any significant force. Since you’re not applying this force over any time (or distance), the total energy transferred into the ant is very small. This, combined with the effective armor exoskeleton, is why it’s difficult to kill insects by swatting them into empty space, but if you push them against a solid object, they squash easily.
TL;DR: Resistant exoskeletons and general properties of small objects make them less likely to be crushed by an outside force.
True ELI5: It’s like trying to break a balloon by punching it in midair. The punch is certainly hard enough, but the balloon just kind of gets pushed away.
In short, because increasing the size of an object increases its volume exponentially and its weight with it.
If you have a 10 foot sided cube its volume is 1000 cubic feet.
Il you double the size of each of its sides, it becomes 8000 cubic feet which is more than the double.
Small things are stronger. This is due to volume scaling cubed while cross section(strength) scales linearly. If King Kong would exist, he would be crushed under his own weight and his bones would have to be thicker than his body could contain. This gets cool with micron-scale structures like MEMS. You can “build” crazy looking structures that would never work at normal scale.
One way to look at it, is to look at a popsicle. Just imagine scaling that up to t the point that the stick is as big as a tree trunk, now imagine the size of the ice at the end. If you would hold the giant popsicle side-ways, it would clearly snap the stick from gravity alone.
An ant can handle the weight of an enormous object resting on it because its exoskeleton is providing equal pressure on the object, in all area that is in contact with the ant, thus no single point on the ant has to sustain the full weight.
It’s the square-cube law. Scale an ant up 100 times bigger and its skeleton and muscles would be 10 000 times stronger (square law). Scale up the object you’re dropping on them 100 times and it’s 1 000 000 times heavier (cube law).
You’re used to living in a large world where you can’t lift something that weighs 10 times your own weight but that’s easy for tiny animals.
The square-cube law affects many aspects on the way living things and machines work, like, breathing, heating and cooling, eating, etc. You can’t simply scale things either up or down too far and expect them to work like they did before. That’s why big animals have different body shapes to small ones, and why insects can’t get too big and mammals can’t get too small.
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