Q & A With a Four Year Old: "How Do Ants Carry Stuff?"

Out of the blue, my four year old asked, "How do ants carry stuff?"  We've all seen the cartoons of ants carrying whole pieces of food on their back like this, right?



picture courtesy of Carla Haley; uaex.edu

We imagine an army of ants is going to walk across our picnic blanket, pick up our entire sandwich, and haul it back to it's nest carefully on it's back.  However, this isn't accurate at all.  In reality, ants use their mandibles, or jaws, to hold and carry things.  These same mandibles can be used for biting, cutting, digging, and fighting.  This would be a more accurate image:



photo courtesy of blog.wildaboutants.com

Unlike the average person, ants can carry 10-50 times their body weight.  It's not that ants have superpowers, it's that the proportion of their mass that is muscle is very high.  Ants' muscles are thicker relative to their body size than those of larger animals or humans.  This means they can produce more force pound for pound, or in an ant's case, milligram for milligram.

Here's a great photo of a leaf cutter ant carrying a leaf more than three times its size:



photo by Roy Toft; nationalgeographic.com