How does an ant survive a fall from a great height but another creature dies in a fall from a height of same scale ?
In: Biology
You might want to read JBS Haldane’s classic essay “[On Being the Right Size](http://www.phys.ufl.edu/courses/phy3221/spring10/HaldaneRightSize.pdf)”
He writes about 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.
As animals get smaller, they have a higher and higher surface area relative to their mass, so they fall more slowly. There are a number of other side-effects that depend on size, which are discussed in the article.
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