How Are Ants So Strong? 🐜

Morning my little ants!

Take a look at this:

Dang, those little dudes are strong.

Ants can somehow lift up to 50 times their own bodyweight.

That's like you casually lifting a whole ass car above your head.

But, what exactly makes ants so strong?

Unbelievably, it's actually due to their size.

Let me explain:

So, Imagine you have a cube.

-The Sides are 10 inches

-The Area is 10 inches SQUARED

-The Volume is 10 inches CUBED

Following so far?

Now, what happens if you double the length of the sides?

The 10 inch sides turn into 20 inch sides.

Which are twice the size.

But, the area becomes 4 times the size.

And the volume… becomes 8 TIMES the size.

Basically the volume increases faster than the area.

And the area increases faster than the length.

AKA: The Square Cube Law.

Okay, okay, but how does this relate to ants?

Well, in animals, muscle strength is related to the area of your muscles, not how big they are.

Why? Well, put very simply:

The bigger the area, the more muscle fibers you have.

And More muscle fibers = More force.

So, as the size of the animal increases, muscle volume increases faster than muscle area.

(As we saw with the cube thing earlier).

Meaning their muscle mass increases much faster than their muscle strength.

So bigger animals have to waste a good amount of their strength just to support their own massive weight.

And here's the thing is, ants don't have very much mass.

They weigh like 1 milligram.

So, the fact that they are tiny means they have more muscle area and less muscle mass.

Therefore, they can lift more!

Stay Cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan 🌈

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