4th
ants, man
Given, that ants can carry things 20 times heavier than they themselves are, and humans can only carry, say, a quarter of their own weight. That sounds impressive, but…well is it impressive?
How much you can carry is indeed correlated with how much you weigh, which is a function of volume, which increases cubically. Many things integral to the structural integrity of a living thing, like anything calculated with a surface area, like skin, or a radius, like veins (I guess), increase with a squared term. When you think about it that way, it’s no surprise that something way smaller than a human can carry things that are also way smaller than humans, but large in proportion to themselves.
Not saying that ants aren’t pretty boss, just saying the following:
1: an ant inflated to our scale, as has been often noted (if you have a subconscious fixation with ants at least), would collapse and die immediately, because its exoskeleton is a function of surface area, and only increases with a squared power, while its weight increases cubically.
2: an ant lifting a rock ten times heavier than itself is impressive like an amoeba eating a slightly larger amoeba amoeba is impressive, in that it’s interesting if you disregard scale. But, ridiculous things happen in the land of the tiny on a regular basis.
3: and finally, it’s almost deceiving to compare the carrying abilities of an ant to those of a human because the scale, in effect, works so heavily in the favor of the ants. So, here’s another, admittedly flawed, way to think about it. Ants are around 4 millimeters long, and can carry a load of about 60 milligrams, which is about 15 grams/meter. Humans are about 1.6 meters tall, and can carry, say 20 kilograms. That’s about 12,500 grams/meter.
So, by that metric, we’re like 1,000 times stronger than ants, no exaggeration. Irresponsible modeling, perhaps, but no exaggeration.
