Ants and Beetles are SUPER STRONG,
Even compared to other animals outside insects
Like Gorillas, but even then Gorillas are nowhere near as strong as those insects when it comes to pound for pound despite having much more muscle mass
I always thought that it had something to do with the insect’s anatomy or the shape of the object they’re carrying which led me to believe they could somehow redirect the force applied to them, there’s just so many variables going on, it’s so interesting but I never got a clear answer.
In: Biology
An ant the size of an gorilla/elephant/etc would just… die. Ants are so strong for their size precisely because they are so small, and their world and interactions with it are somewhat different than our own. While there’s a lot of detail and implications to go down the rabbit hole of, the basic root of it all is the square-cube law. This is the relation that surface area increases as a square, while volume increases as a cube, so for every time you increase the size of the creature, its volume is increasing *significantly* faster than its surface area. Not every force scales with volume here, so when you have life at larger scales, certain things like water surface tension (deadly to insects, because of how strong it is and how it can literally be inescapable–drops of water are deathtraps) is not a big deal, but now you need a sturdy skeleton to keep yourself from collapsing under your own weight. Meanwhile, an ant can literally be thrown at the ground and remain unscathed.
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