sorry about my grammar, and idk if this subreddit requires flairs…
In:
In any organism, the volume of an organism goes up in a cubic fashion (because we exist in three dimensions) while muscle cross section area (how strong a muscle is) only goes up in a squared fashion (because a cross section of muscle is only two dimensions by definition).
If you take an organism that’s 3m long, wide, and high that’s 9m^2 of potential muscle cross section area and 27m^3 of volume. So the ratio of muscle area to volume is 3:1. But if you have an organism that’s 0.3m length, width, and height that’s 0.09m^2 of potential muscle cross section area and 0.027m^3 of volume. The ratio of muscle area to volume is now 3.33:1.
Now obviously organisms aren’t all muscle. This is just to illustrate how the math works. As you go down in size, the ratio of muscle cross section to volume will generally increase (depending on the organism). So an ant that’s particularly tiny will have a very large ratio of muscle cross section area to the volume of its body and be able to carry much more relatively than a larger animal.
It has to do with the square cube law. When you scale the size of an organism, it’s weight/volume change cynically, while it’s muscle and bone strength scale quadratically. This means that when you scale an ant to the size of a human, it wouldn’t be able to even walk around. The only reason they are so strong relatively to their bodies is bc they’re so small. It’s just like how if humans were 20 ft tall we’d all just die
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