Ants Use Their Own Velcro to Catch Supersized Prey
They’ve got really high hopes.
A. andreae colonies live in trees, and individual ants line the underside edges of leaves, jaws open and outstretched. When an insect lands, the ants seize its legs, holding it down until other ants dismember the pinioned prey.
In the new study, the researchers held weighted threads in front of the ants. Instinctively, the ants bit and held. Without losing its grip, the average worker could hold on to 8 grams, or some 5,700 times its body weight. In proportional terms, that’s like a house cat holding on to a humpback whale. Passing insects don’t have a chance.
Something about the numbers don’t add up for me, though. This puts an ant’s mass at a milligram or two, and that seems very small.
A milligram or two would put the volume of the ant somewhere around 1 cubic millimeters. I’d buy that for a smaller ant: a few mm long, less than a mm in diameter?
And if you wanted to claim really high strength-to-weight-ratios, you’d pick the smallest ant you could find, since weight goes as size^3 while strength goes as size^2.
The weight was taken by averaging over a few hundred workers. However, 1.4 mg is somewhat reasonable.
OK, then. I was thinking at least tens of mg. No wonder ants are always mad at me — I think they’re fat!