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
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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