An amazing fact of Nature

                                                             [worker ant]

In this picture what you are watching is an amazing fact of this wondrous world and it took place in front of my eyes on 10th May 2013 in the morning and I made no mistake to capture it in Close-Up mode . This little ant impelled me to know the  fact from inside.

This little worker ant was dragging / carrying a seed of  Bottle Gourd/ Calabash ( Laoo)   , which was atleast 50 times of its own  body weight.

Actually, an ant can carry items 10 - 50 times their own body weight.

A video posted by Suman Kalyan Biswas (@sumankalyanbiswas) on Jan 24, 2017 at 2:39am PST

Ants are bringing food which is at least 50 times of the body weight of each ant. It is amazing to watch. This video is captured in time laps mode to capture the details of every action taken place in a long time gap.

The reason that ants can lift so much is because of scaling: ant muscles are no stronger than human muscles on a pull-for-pull basis, but the small size of ants gives them an advantage on how much muscle force they can produce on the object it is carrying or dragging.

A muscle is basically a bundle of fibres which can contract and create a pulling force- the amount of force produced by a muscle is proportional to the cross sectional area of that bundle of fibres. Consider a bundle of bungee cords- one bungee cord has a small cross sectional area, and doesn't exert much force (you wouldn't jump off a bridge with just one bungee cord to stop you!); a bundle of bungee cords, such as is used for bungee jumping, has a much greater cross sectional area, and exerts much more force (enough force to stop a bungee jumper from hitting the ground!). In human terms, you can think of a human bicep- the bigger the bicep, the larger the cross-sectional area, and the more force (or strength) that can be applied by that bicep. A fellow by the name of Wigglesworth, in 1972, looked at the strength of insect and vertebrate muscles, in terms of force per square centimetre, and found that they both exerted similar forces, so it's not that ant muscles are somehow stronger.

                                                       

                                                                       [ worker ant ]

           

The reason that ants can lift so much is because body size (in terms of volume, which is closely related to mass) increases as a cube of length- while the cross sectional area of muscles increases as the square of length. So, as the size of an organism increases, its mass increases at a much greater rate than the cross-sectional area of its muscles, so those muscles have proportionately more mass to lift.

So, the reason ants can lift so much is because their small size means they don't have a large body mass that they must carry around- they have proportionately more muscle (in terms of that cross-sectional area) that they can use to lift heavy things. Conversely, humans are proportionately more massive, and have less muscle that can be applied to lifting heavy things.  Let us see the diagram below:

                                    

Here ,  we  see that as size increases from big to small, the difference between mass and the amount of force that can be produced by the muscles gets greater and greater. In effect then, we humans have all this extra mass we must lug around, and we have proportionately less muscle to apply force on it, which keeps us from being able to lift as much of our body weight as ants can.

The ant is a small sized invertebrate that is found all around the world, with the exception of the polar regions including the Arctic Circle and Antarctica  and can be called very successfull creatures in evolution: may form 15–25% of the terrestrial animal biomass.

 Ants are social insects of the family Formicidae and, along with the related wasps and bees, belong to the order Hymenoptera.

 Ants represent one of the greatest wonders of the natural world - a colonial 'brain' made up of countless individual, mobile units, equipped with a range of special functions and abilities, all working together in a manner akin to a neural network. They are capable of solving problems and

Overcoming obstacles as a group that would stump any individual organism of such diminutive stature.

 They are also of invaluable benefit to their environment, helping to control unwanted pests and plants, enriching and aerating the soil, and even spreading seeds.

They can also be a force of destruction; an inexorable tide of mass-consumption, striking fear even into organisms many, many times their individual size... yet still serve a purpose in this state by removing decomposing matter.

As an organised, problem-solving, resilient, specialized  varied (there are many thousands of different ant species), and remarkably adaptable organism that demonstrates extraordinary problem-solving abilities (such as constructing a living raft of workers to transport their queen across water), ants are among the 'coolest' of all creatures.

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source:  Wikipediaand , Verious science magazines.