How do bugs and small animals survive extreme winds without the wind force killing them

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I always think on a windy day how doesn’t the wind force just kill them or make them hit stuff?

In: Biology

Anonymous 0 Comments

Forces are experienced quite a lot differently when you weigh that little. It’s largely related to the square-cube law, which is ultimately the reason why tossing an insect off a building is a mild inconvenience, a small mouse might be stunned or bruised, a person would probably be gravely if not *fatally* wounded, and a large mammal like an elephant might explode in a puddle of gore.

An ant hitting a wall when its own absurdly tiny weight is providing the momentum… isn’t going to do much. It’s distributed too well by the area of contact relative to volume, so the actual force it experiences is tiny. If you launch something larger with the same speed though, and that will get increasingly awful, because you’re exponentially increasing mass compared to surface effects/contact.