Watching an ant today, I got to thinking about how tiny insects and bacteria must perceive water and air.
An ant can fall off the Empire State Building, and I presume it just billows lightly to the ground. It’s so small that air resistance must have a much greater effect on it.
A tiny insect must perceive water very differently than we do. It can’t really get wet; it might have tiny globules of water stuck to itself though. To take a drink, it must approach a drop of water as if approaching a vertical wall, and expend some effort to break the surface tension. Like kissing silly-putty.
Tinier creatures still must approach being able to perceive individual air molecules, or, at any rate, I’m sure the air is a different substance for them than for us.
That is my mundane and pointless thought for the day.
What really intrigues me, however, is the idea of living on a planet where one has to dodge these billions of mile-high creatures that just do seemingly random motions, but if they happen to move in a certain direction, there goes your life! That must be really frightening (well, insofar as ants could be frightened) to be at the whim of billions of quasi-divine creatures.
I don’t know – most people consider ants to be pests and worthy of extermination, but probably not all women consider you to be a pest worthy of extermination. I hope not extermination anyway!
I wonder if spiders pity the poor creatures with only two legs.
The OP is substantially correct and indeed the different behaviours of fluids such as air at different scales (or rather a lack of appreciation of the different behaviours) is exactly what inspired the ‘Bumblebee is incapable of flight’ myth.
Some very small insects do not fly through the air; they swim - in a few cases, their wings do not consist of flat surfaces at all, but tiny little brushes.
If you drop a long-legged spider from an upstaris window, it ‘skydives’ - you can see it stretch out its legs in a star formation, just like a human skydiver; the difference is that the terminal velocity of the spider never gets fast enough to cause a fatal fall.
