New Study: Ants Can Lift up to 5,000 Times Their Body Weight

COLUMBUS, Ohio — High hopes may help move a rubber tree plant (as the old song goes), but the real secret to the ant’s legendary strength may lie in its tiny neck joint.

In the Journal of Biomechanics, researchers report that the neck joint of a common American field ant can withstand pressures up to 5,000 times the ant’s weight.

“Ants are impressive mechanical systems—astounding, really,” said Carlos Castro, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at The Ohio State University. “Before we started, we made a somewhat conservative estimate that they might withstand 1,000 times their weight, and it turned out to be much more.”

The engineers are studying whether similar joints might enable future robots to mimic the ant’s weight-lifting ability on earth and in space.

Other researchers have long observed ants in the field and guessed that they could hoist a hundred times their body weight or more, judging by the payload of leaves or prey that they carried. Castro and his colleagues took a different approach.

They took the ants apart.

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Source: Ohio State University