How Much Weight Can an Ant Carry? How Much Do They Weigh?

Ants are nature’s ultimate workhorses, tirelessly toiling in rigid and seamlessly coordinated routines to make their colonies survive. Their determined work makes for intriguing viewing, especially as you witness them transport surprisingly hefty foods and other objects back to their nests. The typical worker ant can often carry over 50 times its body weight! Their own weight is roughly 2–10 mg. 

That incredible capacity is a function of several factors, including the ant’s size, muscle and joint structure, and group habits. Learn how these tiny creatures utilize their natural advantages to help them manage extreme forces.

How Much Weight Can an Ant Carry?

An ant can lift anywhere from 10 to over 50 times its body weight due to its large muscles and light exoskeleton. Ants earn attention for their comparative strength, but a high carrying capacity is common to undersized insects. Unlike humans, who must carry the weight of their sizable bodies, ants can devote all their lifting power to objects, making them relatively strong.

Muscles lose that relative strength as bodies grow. A muscle’s power is proportional to its surface area (squared dimensions), but body weight is related to its volume (cubed dimensions).

In other words, a smaller muscle will have greater power relative to weight than a much larger muscle, even though the larger one has more overall power. We often hear how a person could lift a car with the comparable strength of an ant but don’t consider that a human-sized ant wouldn’t have the relative power of a normal-sized ant.

The Impressive Lifting Capacity of Ants

The natural design of an ant’s joints allows them to tolerate extreme pressures, a characteristic that engineers are studying to apply to modern mechanics. Researchers have found that microscopic structures and graded material hardnesses around an ant’s neck joint can let it withstand up to 5,000 times its body weight in pressure. Experts believe that, depending on the species and the ant’s role in the colony, some specimens could withstand up to double that weight.

Although their bodies can handle the strain, ants generally can’t lift and carry that much weight. As ants lift their loads in their powerful mandibles, the neck joints and leg muscles are crucial in helping them accomplish their daily tasks. With their lifting technique focusing on the front of their bodies, balance is more influential. Because of their tiny body size, the weight they can lift is much less than the force their bodies can tolerate.

By coordinating their efforts, groups can lift weights over 1,000 times heavier than a single ant. The synchronized cooperative efforts of multiple ants create a mechanism that can efficiently dig out intricate tunnels and lift enormous food items to transport to the nest.

How Much Does an Ant Weigh?

We know an ant can lift 10–50 times its body weight, but how much is that in actual pounds? Ants are minuscule, measuring only 50–75 mm long on average. A typical ant weighs roughly 2–10 mg, meaning they can potentially lift up to 500 mg, or about the weight of a Tic Tac.

Carrying Capacity Comparison

As mentioned, relative strength is often a matter of scale, with incredibly light, small animals having greater lifting power. The following briefly breaks down various creatures and their comparable carrying capacities.

Beyond scale, the joint and muscle structure allow ants to hold up under more intense forces. Oversized neck, jaw, and head muscles all combine to enhance their strength, though often at the expense of flexibility. Other insects, such as rhinoceros beetles, have similar bolstered body supports, allowing them to lift over 100 times their body weight.

Conclusion

Ants may be unassuming, but their minute size and advantageous physical structure make them, pound-for-pound, some of the strongest creatures on the planet. Their work demands extra power, and ants have developed critical mechanisms to help them carry massive items. As humans search for novel and efficient ways to design the machines that power our world, ants could even teach us how to improve modern technology.

Featured Image Credit: PavanPrasad_IND, Shutterstock