ants can carry how much weight
An ant weighs, on average, between 1 and 5 milligrams. With almost 10,000 ant species worldwide, the combined weight of all the ants on Earth is greater than that of all the people. Continue Reading. An ant weighs, on average, between 1 and 5 milligrams. With almost 10,000 ant species worldwide, the combined weight of all the ants on Earth is greater than that of all the people. Keep Learning. Why can ants lift so much? · 5 years ago. Ant strength is due to their small size. An ant worker can lift an object weighing five to ten times its weight and can drag a 20-50 times heavier object, whereas humans can rarely lift their own weight. How much weight can an ant carry? According to different estimates, ants can carry 10 - 50 times their body weight! How? Because ants are so small, their muscles have a greater cross-sectional area (they are thicker) relative to their body size than in larger animals. This means they can produce more force pound-for-pound (or in the case of an ant, milligram-for-milligram). Feb 10, 2014 04:51 PM EST. The ability of worker ants to carry many times their own body weight is well documented, but new research on heavy-lifting ants reveals that the neck joint of a common American field ant can withstand pressures up to 5,000 times greater than its own body weight. At forces corresponding to 350 times the ants' body weight, the neck joint began to stretch and the body lengthened. The ants' necks ruptured at forces of 3,400-5,000 times their average body weight.. This gives us a surface area of about 4.87e-5, or 0.0000487 square meters. So an ant that weighs 0.000025 kg with a length of 5 millimeters has a surface are a of about 0.0000487 m2. This gives a weight/surface area rate of about 0.5335 kg/m2. So, the uniform strength of an ant is about thirteen times more than a human's. We’ll use the scale factor of k = 100 that we found earlier. Since strength increases as the square of the scale factor, the human-sized ant can support 10^4 = 10,000 times as much weight. However, the human-sized ant is 10^6 =1,000,000 times as heavy. That’s 100 times more weight than the human-size ant legs can support! Said another way, a normal ant is 100 times stronger, relative to its weight, than a human (or an ant-sized human). Sure, for mountain climbing it's perfectly reasonable, and your point works perfectly with a conservative 20kg estimate; it's just that 'what weight can a human carry over rough terrain' for an average conscript/recruit after basic training often is 50-55% of body weight, so 20kg is not nearly a maximum. However, ant muscles are no stronger than human muscles (in terms of force per cm2), but the small size of ants (one to five milligrams) gives them an advantage on how much muscle force they can produce.
Between 1 and 5 milligrams