How much does an ant weigh and how much can it lift?

For almost every person, ants are associated with hard work, self-sacrifice and the ability to work day and night for the benefit of the colony. There is even a saying: "Work like a hundred ants." In addition, scientists have found that ants can boast not only an enviable "workaholism", but also amazing physical abilities. And knowing how much an ant weighs, one can only wonder how they succeed.

Even in schools, students are told that ants can lift loads more than their own weight, 10 times their own weight. But as it turned out, this is not the limit - as the study of ants, more and more impressive facts about their abilities become clear ...

 

How much does an ant and all ants in general weigh?

The average weight of an ant varies depending on the species from 1 to 150 milligrams. Our typical black and red wood ants weigh about 5-7 milligrams.

The lightest ants are pharaoh ants, well-known domestic pests, and some types of tropical ants, which are just as small. The mass of an ant from the caste of workers in these species is 1-2 milligrams.

And some of the largest ant species are the South American bullet ant and African wandering ants.In the former, a working ant weighs up to 90 milligrams, while in the latter, the uterus diligently grows stout during the period of settled life and can weigh up to 10 grams!

At this time, such a uterus can lay up to 120 thousand eggs every day, which is also one of the records not only for insects, but also among other animals in general. In addition, both the bullet ant and wandering ants (siafu) are among the most dangerous in the world.

It turns out that one queen of a wandering ant weighs as much as 200-700 working individuals weigh. Although there are species - for example, jumping ants - in which the queens from working ants practically do not differ either in size or in mass. But these ants have many other distinguishing features. For example, even simple worker ants can breed in them.

It is interesting

The largest ants that lived on Earth had a body length of up to 7 cm in queens. If you extrapolate their mass, it turns out that such monsters weighed about 20 grams.

In general, ants are so widespread and so numerous that their total mass on the planet is greater than that of any other group of insects. According to scientists, all ants on Earth weigh about the same as all people weigh - about one billion tons. At the same time, there are approximately 10 million ants for each person.

But what is interesting about ants is not even how much they weigh, but their ability to lift objects that are very heavy compared to their body weight.

 

How much weight does the ant lift?

Today it has been verified that, on average, an ant can lift 50 times its own weight. - for example, up to 100 mg is carried by each working leaf-cutting ant. Knowing how much an ant weighs, you can calculate what he is capable of as a weightlifter.

Interestingly, in leaf-cutting ants, the soldiers weigh several tens of times more than ordinary workers, and the uterus - 700 times! Naturally, in this species, soldiers appear only in those anthills, the number of which exceeds 100 thousand individuals - it is difficult for a smaller number of workers to feed such an army.

In principle, a soldier of this type can set a more outstanding record, but he never does: his task is not to carry loads, but to protect the “loaders”.

On a note

If a person could lift weight in the same proportions as ants do, then he would easily squeeze a barbell up to 5 tons over his head. That is, the strength of an ant exceeds that of a person by about 25 times. As mathematicians cleverly calculated, it would take about a million ants to carry an adult human, and about 10,000 to carry a mug of beer. Of course, the results of such measurements depend on the type of ant and how much each of them weighs.

Of course, the smaller the ant, the less mass it lifts. However, the ratio of the lifted weight to the mass of the ant itself increases as the size of the insect decreases.

It is interesting

With the joint transfer of weights, the abilities of ants increase even more. During laboratory experiments, an ant alone developed a power of 24.2 erg/sec, and two ants together developed a power of 63.2 erg/sec. That is, an ant can lift in cooperation with a friend as much as they can not lift both of them taken together on their own.

Why are ants so strong?

I must say that not only ants are so strong: in general, all insects can develop very high power. The same fleas very quickly push their body to a distance 150 times their body length.And scarab beetles can lift 850 times their body weight. In front of such abilities, even an ant's strength doesn't seem that great.

The reason for such phenomenal abilities of ants and insects in general has long been explained by scientists. In the animal world, there is a law according to which, with a decrease in the geometric dimensions of the body of a living being, its mass decreases in proportion to the length of the body to the third power, and the cross-sectional area of ​​\u200b\u200bmuscles is proportional to the square of the body length.

A little complicated, but it means that ants have 100 times stronger muscles per unit mass than humans. And this proportion is observed for other living creatures - crustaceans, fish, mammals. And additionally, the external skeleton and a slightly different muscle structure contribute their own allowances to these calculations.

In general, this does not mean that the smallest ant is the strongest. Indeed, the tiny pharaoh ant lifts more times the weight that the giant wandering ant lifts. But the absolute mass of the load in the case of a domestic pest is less. Therefore, the strongest ant is just the largest.

 

Ant abilities

However, the strength of ants is determined not only by the weight that they can lift. Ants use their physical abilities in other ways as well.

For example, ant bridges are very well known, which are organized by working individuals of African nomadic ants to transfer larvae and queens through water barriers. Several hundred ants seize each other's bodies so tightly that a cat-sized mammal can run across the bridge to the other side of the stream.True, no animal tries to do this - these ants are extremely dangerous because of their painful bites.

And the same leaf-cutting ants can drag along the ground a load weighing 30 times their body weight. The need for this may arise when the insect, due to the non-standard size of the object, cannot lift it above its head.

It is interesting that especially resourceful representatives of Homo Sapiens have learned to use many of these abilities of ants for their own purposes.

 

Ants build a bridge (video)

 

Is it possible to use "ant power"?

In Central Africa, the powerful jaws of ants are used to sew up open wounds on the body: the two edges of the wound are pressed against each other and an angry ant is applied to them like a stapler with its head. The insect immediately compresses the jaws and tightly squeezes both edges of the skin. A few of these ants - and the seam is ready. It is only important to cut off the ant's head with scissors as soon as possible: after that, the jaws will no longer open.

Sometimes in the same Africa, the natives extract tasty seeds and small nuts from anthills, using ants as gatherers. However, the natives are incredibly ethical in this regard - instead of stocks taken from the anthill, they leave pieces of dried meat or fruit for insects. They know that if nature is not plundered, but equally shared with it, it will thank many times over.

 

Interesting video: 6 most dangerous and poisonous ants