The rhinoceros beetle is listed as the world strongest in the guiness book of records. This source claims it can lift 100 times its body weight.
But this perspective doesn’t look fair to me. Strength increases with the square of the length, while size increases with the cube of the length. So a more fair view would be to say, which animal can lift the most weight if they were all the same size.
I will try to do a calculation to illustrate what I mean. Not sure if Im doing it right.
The beetle weighs 20 grams. I weigh 75000 grams. Ignoring differences in density that means that i am 3750 times as large as the beetle. Now, I calculate 3750^(2/3), which is 240. Im not sure what their definition of “lifting” is, but I should at least be able to lift my body weight. So if I were that size I could lift 2.4 times as much as the beetle.
Now, the questions:
Is this not a more sensible way to look at it? Did I do the calculations right? If so, what animal is actually the worlds strongest?
I’m not sure if the beetle in question is the strongest animal, but the math you’re doing here is totally eluding me. I can’t see how this is relevant to the question.
Keep in mind that up to a certain point and exoskeleton is a stronger design than an endoskeleton. Shrinking a creature with a endoskeleton to beetle size (or expanding a beetle to people size) is going to change your equation well beyond just the objects relative mass and dimensions.
The equation (if I made it right, I’m not sure) gives me how many times my own weight I could lift, if I were the size of a beetle.
Imagine a 222 cube. The volume is 8, and surface area on one surface is 4. Now take a cube with twice the surface area on one surface, it would have the dimensions 2.83 * 2.83 * 2.83, and the volume 22.6. So while I doubled the surface area (which muscle strength is proportional to), I more than doubled the volume (which mass is proportional to.)
So if you double my size, I would be able to lift much less, in terms of my body size. This doesn’t seem to me to mean that I become less “strong”. As an analogy, imagine a man who lives on the moon. Gravity is far less strong, so he would be able to lift many times more than me. But I wouldn’t call him stronger than me.
I agree with the sentiment of the OP, and my own solution is that ‘strength to scale’ is a completely meaningless notion.
You want to find the world’s strongest animal, go with whatever can push, pull, or lift the greatest weight in absolute terms. If that gives the largest animals an advantage, fine.
Of course, then you get into a few more interesting problems. For the blue whale, for interesting… can it push weight through the water, or do we could how much weight it can lift above the water when surfacing?? How do we tell muscular strength apart from sheer buoyancy?
I think the thing you are missing though is that if you shrink yourself to the size of the Rhinocerous beatle you will probably be weaker than it, and if you expanded it to your size it probably wouldn’t be able to stand at all.
Your method is only meaningful if there is some default volume at which all animals would be compared. And I suspect that the result of such an undertaking would be to find that an animal that’s natural size was the same as the test size would win.
I definitely agree with this. However I think we could meaningfully abstract from it. In my moon analogy, I would die because of lack of oxygen on the moon. But I’d still say it makes sense to estimate what my strength there would have been.
Or we could define relative strength as being relative to body surface.
At least we should stop saying that the beetle is the strongest animal. This really confused me as a kid. I thought that the human structure was incredibly stupid and powerless as compared to insects’.
I think the best you could do to find the “ultimate” strongest animal would be take every animal of approximately the same size and compare how many times their own size they could lift. Then you graph that on a scale of 1 to 100, and do this for every subclass of animal size. When you are done, the animal at 100 which has the most distant follower up (#99) would be your strongest animal.
Of course this makes various assumptions like that there won’t be any range of animals that simply doesn’t need much muscle, so it’s winner may only come out significantly ahead even though mathematically he should be middle of the road.
