How Many Times Can an Ant Lift Its Own Weight? Insect Super-Strong on a Small Scale

Ants are small but terrible as they can carry objects thousands of times their weight. However, that only applies on a small scale, as a human-sized ant can't do the same.

How Many Times Can An Ant Lift Its Own Weight

Ants have been seen carrying items bigger than their size. Some believed they could take things ten or a hundred times heavier than them. Researchers had long observed ants' strength based on the amount of leaves or prey they carry in the field and hypothesized that they could lift a hundred times their body weight or more.

Carlos Castro, an assistant mechanical and aerospace engineering professor at The Ohio State University, and his associates experimented to find out. However, they had to take the ants apart.

As with every engineering system, they have to disassemble it to determine how it operates. Although it might appear harsh initially, Castro said they anesthetize them beforehand.

They used micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) equipment to X-ray the ants and electron microscopy to scan them. After anesthetizing the ants in a refrigerator, they glued them face down in a centrifuge that was explicitly made to measure the force required to distort the neck and eventually tear the head from the body.

The ant was subjected to increasing force as the centrifuge rotated up to hundreds of rotations per second. The body lengthened, and the neck joint started to stretch at stresses equal to 350 times the ants' body weight. The ants' necks burst at forces 3,400-5,000 times their usual body weight.

The soft tissue structure of the neck and its relationship to the body's and head's hard exoskeleton were made clear by micro-CT images. Electron microscopy images showed that the head, neck, and chest joint was covered in various textures, with structures resembling bumps or hairs protruding from multiple places.

"Ants are impressive mechanical systems-astounding, really," Castro said. "Before we started, we made a somewhat conservative estimate that they might withstand 1,000 times their weight, and it turned out to be much more."

However, ants' strength is limited to their size - it's small scale. On a human-sized scale, the laws of physics triumph against ants.

Their total volume grows with weight, but their muscle strength only rises with surface area. Therefore, if a human-sized ant existed outside of a horror film, it probably wouldn't be as effective at transporting heavy objects on a human scale.

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Do Ants Feel Pain?

Ants do not experience pain in the same way humans do. Nociception prevents them from experiencing pain in the same manner that we do, even though they are still able to detect harm and react to it.

A signal known as nociception travels via the peripheral nervous system and reaches the central nervous system due to the stimulation of specific sensory receptors called nociceptors. It is how unpleasant sensations are encoded and processed by the brain.

The physiological process that protects body tissues from damage is called nociception. Nociceptors are triggered by stimuli that may be damaging. Nociception is essential for the body's "fight or flight response" and protection against environmental harm.

The nociceptors in ants produce what can be described as a painful stimulus. They use electrical impulses in response to environmental changes and alert the ant to potentially dangerous stimulants. However, ants only respond by avoiding the stimulation or withdrawing from it.