Eli5 Why are ants so resistant to dying by falling?
In: 18
There’s a great old paper on this by JBS Haldane, called [On Being the Right Size](https://www.phys.ufl.edu/courses/phy3221/spring10/HaldaneRightSize.pdf). It’s a pretty easy read, so anyone interested in this stuff might want to take a look at it.
Here’s a relevant passage discussing the force of gravity
>To the mouse and any smaller animal it presents practically no
dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force.
>An insect, therefore, is not afraid of gravity; it can fall without danger, and can cling to the ceiling with remarkably little trouble. It can go in for elegant and fantastic forms of support like that of the daddy-longlegs.
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