In the Hornet vs Bees video from the Amazing Video thread, it claims that as few as 30 hornets can kill a colony of 30,000 honeybees. Given the hornet is 5 times bigger than a bee, this means that each hornet can kill up to 200 times it’s weight in bees.
Is there any other animal that can do better than this?
Rules:
It has to be death by combat or wounding. Bacteria and virii causing diesese doesn’t count.
It has to be habitual, a fluke sparrow killing and elephant doesn’t count. But if there are snakes that routinely kill elephants, that would count.
Seperate categories for animals which kill via poison and animals which kill via wounding.
Well a bee,wasp,hornet,spider or scorpian can kill a full grown human under the right conditions. Perhaps even two on a good day. Does this violate your forth rule or does that only pertain to humans doing the killing?
My bet would be on some kind of spider I think. They can probably manage to kill other large animals too, though it might be harder to find data on that.
Despite the depiction in jungle movies, this is not correct. Army ants rarely if ever take on anything larger than a small lizard or a baby bird (though they might be able to kill something larger that was so incapacitated it couldn’t get away - but then again, other ants can do that as well.)
The OP comparision is a bit lacking I think; after all a hornet is physically larger than a bee. It’s rather like bragging what an awesome killing machine a fox is, because of all the mice they can kill over their lifetime. A hornet can kill 200 bees yes, but could a hornet kill a bee 200 times its weight?
As far as one-on-one killing, in their northern ranges, pumas (~150 lbs) regularly kill elk five times their weight, but southern-US pumas rarely weigh over 100 lbs and live mostly on desert hares–difficult to catch but not real dangerous.
The second greatest predator:prey ratio I think is the clouded leopard .
It’s a protozoan.