Are Ants Strong? The Secret To Their Strength
It’s no secret that ants are strong. These small insects show remarkable feats of strength as they carry things many times bigger and heavier. In fact, if we consider size and body weight, then ants are even stronger than us humans.
In this article we’ll look into just how strong ants are, and why exactly they possess such strength.
How Strong Are Ants?
Ants are generally capable of carrying more than ten times their body weight with some ants capable of carrying fifty or more. An Asian weaver ant, for instance, was photographed carrying a 500 mg (0.02oz) weight with its jaws while hanging upside down on a glass-like surface. That’s about 100 times its own weight and almost equivalent to an average man carrying two elephants!
Research has also discovered that the joint of the common American field ant can withstand pressures up to 5,000 times its own weight. And while that doesn’t necessarily indicate how much these field ants can lift, it still ultimately highlights their strength.
Now of course, when it comes to absolute strength, ants can’t compare to us humans. It’s impossible, for example, for an ant to carry something we consider light like a spoon or a fork. If we’re talking about how many times we can carry over our body weight though, then ants most certainly have us beat.
The average human will struggle to lift even twice it’s body weight. Even the world’s strongest man was only capable of carrying around 2.5 times. So ten times? Impossible.
Why Are Ants Strong?
So what’s the secret to their tremendous strength? Are ant muscles made of steel?
Well, not quite. It does help though that they’re physically built to be strong. Their muscles, joints, and overall bodies are so compact and tightly put together that they’re capable of withstanding heavy pressure.
But that’s not all there is to it. In fact, the biggest factor to their strength is their size. To be more precise, it’s due to the relationship between size, weight, and strength. To understand this, let’s first define the following:
- Strength. Muscle strength is proportional to the cross-sectional area of the muscle, a two-dimensional measurement.
- Size. On the other hand, size is related to volume, a three-dimensional or cubic measurement.
- Weight. If density is constant, then weight becomes proportional with volume. Meaning the higher the volume, the heavier an object will be.
Since strength and size are related to measurements of different dimensions, they’ll scale differently.
Per scaling laws, strength scales in proportion to the the law A(area) ∝ l2, where l is the length scale. This means that if the shape is unchanged, then the area of a figure or object will scale in proportion to the square of the length scale.
On the other hand, size scales in proportion to the law V(volume) ∝ l3, which then states that volume scales in proportion the cube of the length scale instead.
So should an ant be shrunk in half, then its muscles would have ¼ of their normal strength, while weight and size would be ⅛ of normal. That strength-to-weight ratio means that as something gets smaller, muscle strength gets relatively stronger.
To sum it all up, since ants are small and light, their muscles don’t need to exert much force to support their bodies, which then allows them to freely apply their strength elsewhere.
Related Questions
How Much Can Ants Lift?
It varies from species to species, but again, ants can generally lift around ten times their own body weight with some ants capable of carrying more than fifty. Given that ants may weigh around 1 to 5 mg, this means that they can carry objects weighing 10 to 250 mg or more, depending on their respective weights.
Are Ants Fast?
Like with strength, ants are too small for their absolute speed to be considered fast, at least according to human standards. However, if we consider how far they can travel in terms of body length in a given amount of time, then ants are even faster than us.
For example, the Saharan silver ant, known as the fastest ant in the world has been documented to reach speeds of 0.855 m/s (2.8 ft./s). That’s 108 times their body length per second, and equivalent to around 200 m/s (656 ft./s) for humans.
Are Ants Smart?
While their brains are not as complex as ours, ants still possess intelligence. In fact, they’re considered to be one of the smarter insects in the world.
They’re capable of building complex nests, detecting disease, navigation through terrestrial or celestial cues, and even waging wars.
All in all, despite looking like simple creatures, their actions require certain abilities and smarts, some of which we humans are incapable of.
Summary
While ants won’t be able to lift many of the things we humans can, they’re still considered to be strong animals. In fact, in terms of body weight they’re far stronger than us as they’re capable of carrying ten times their own weight while we humans struggle to even carry two.
This is due to physics, or more specifically scaling laws which state that strength and size, which relate to area and volume respectively, scale in such a way that relative strength increases as size decreases.
