Alright, here’s my question. Could any known species of ant lift and carry a person? We will assume that the person is 150 lbs (I have no idea how to calculate available surface area of an average person). I’ve heard many times that ants can lift a between ten and fifty times their body weight. To answer this question, we will need to know how much various types of ants weigh, how much each ant can lift, and how many of each type of ant could theoretically lift a person at the same time.
If there are any other numbers that should be considered for my armchair calculations, please let me know.
I doubt it. Ants are so small, and the surface of a human just isn’t very flat. Not that many could actually be in contact with something to lift on a man’s body.
A better question might be, could ants carry* a slab, flat on one side, about 6 ft long and 18 inches wide that weighs about the same as a man. Figure an ant needs an area about 1/2 inch by 1/4 inch to work in.
of ants along the length of slab in one colum = 144
of ants along the width of the slab in one row = 72
total # of ants = 10,368
weight that each ant has to lift = 150/10,368 = .0145 lbs
assuming the ant has to weigh 1/50th of that, then the ant must weigh .000289 lbs
assuming the ant has to weigh 1/10th of that, then ant must weigh .00145 lbs
I have no idea how much an ant weighs. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the OP.
*if the slab was truly flat, not even one ant could get under it to lift it.
The paper at http://etd.fcla.edu/UF/UFE0008359/king_j.pdf (summarized on page 74) found outliers as big as 8 mg dry weight, but most weighed 1 mg or less. The numbers you give are in the range 130 - 670 mg.
I think they just mean dead and dried out. Ants get crispy pretty fast after they die so there is additional water weight when they are alive. I is harder to get them to stay still on the scale then however.
That’s 131 mg. Carpenter ants mass 25-50 mgs each, so they’d have to lift closer to 100 times their weight in order to carry a human. There are larger ant species, so the feat might be possible.
As a side note the larger the ant gets I would imagine the strength multiple (ie 50X stronger than a human etc) decreases substantially simply due to biomechanical constraints.
I see no reason why the slab couldn’t be suspended above the ants, until a signal were given. Then, well, most likely, splat. Even if it was lowered slowly until it was touching each ant first.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking would have to happen.
BTW, if you use bigger ants, there will be fewer of them since they take up more space. Assuming, of coure, that the body is whole.
And, if we want to use a real body, instead of the slab I postulated, we’d have to come up with a fudge fact for reducing the number of ants due to the curvature of the body. I suspect that a mulitplier of .25 would be generous, and that .10 would be more realistic (but that’s just a WAG).
