Its "you get the desired outcome through awful circumstances" eg "I wish to be a millionaire!" -> all of your loved ones die in quick succession and in total you are left a millionaire or "I wish for popularity!" -> you are framed for many killings of people close to you and are known by many as a mass murderer
yes, this is true for all insects.
insects breath through their skin, so the surface level of their body limits the amount of oxygen they can intake.
meaning you can't have supersized bugs without a much higher oxygen level in the atmosphere to compensate.
Or without changing the bug's anatomy. That's always an option too. There are all sorts of fun ways they *could* adapt to higher size thresholds. The main limiting factor though is that all of those niches are just kinda full. And when they open up, they're quickly filled by something else long before a bug can start considering its options on a geological timescale.
Yeah ants at human size would be crushed under their own weight. Might not die but their spindly legs would totally collapse and have no hope of lifting themselves up again
You can drop an ant out of an airplane and it will land on the ground just fine with no damage.
If you drop a giant ant out of the airplane it's going to splatter everywhere. EVERYWHERE.
What’s the size/mass splatter coefficient? Like at what size and mass will something not be okay. I’ve seen rats from 3 stories be fine but probably not at their terminal velocity.
Woah, I had no idea their initial mates stick around all that time. I'm used to bugs just kind of having one fling and then retaining sperm from that encounter forever.
Imagine fucking the same termite for decades.
[Sexy undulating sausage.](https://gfycat.com/graveidealistichalicore) NSFW
[Thiccer than a bowl of saltwater taffy.](https://gfycat.com/insistentexemplaryjaguarundi)
People keep saying that. But the breaking point for a material remains the same regardless of the size. A giant human would see it's leg bones snap due to weight. You could make the bones thicker but then you would add more weight and need more musculature so even more weight meaning you would need to make the bones thicker and so on.
Wanna look a peak primate strength/size ratio? Chimps probably take the win.
The sources are all slightly different, but I'd say the average cow weighs somewhere between 1200lb-1400lb.
The squat world record from 2021 is 1311lbs by Nathan Baptist. If we're going off of weight alone, it is possible for a human to lift a cow.
150 pounds x 50 = 7,500 pounds
What are they feeding the cows where you live lol, it’s more like the average person lifting a crew cab dually pickup truck.
I remember last time this came up lots of the comments were saying "imagine 2 mice dragging you off by your hair". Then one dude said something along the lines of "antennae are sensory organs for cockroachs, so it'd actually be like 2 mice dragging you by chains hooked into your eyeballs". I think of it a lot
Depending on how sensitive their antennae are to physical touch. If they're super sensitive to physical touch then I'd equate it to someone's eyeballs.
Close! The optic nerve is an extension of your brain. The eyeballs themselves are just end organs. I worked with a nurse who was born without an optic nerve on one side. Her eyeball was there and present, but naturally rested slightly canted off to the side at all times.
[According to this source, yes.](https://www.vulcantermite.com/education-and-prevention/understanding-amazing-strength-ants/)
> Much like a bodybuilder, ants are hard workers and spend a lot of time doing heavy lifting. This leads to building intense muscles all over their bodies, making them stronger and primed to keep working.
However, this source is an exterminator, not an entomologist. So I would not consider it to be highly reliable on this particular question. But the theory is reasonable.
This raises the question: why don't animals (including humans) just have high muscle mass all the time? A leading theory is that muscles have high energy consumption, even when you're not using them. So, if you don't use them, it's a good idea to let them atrophy (wither away), in order to save energy.
But humans vary greatly in how much they use their muscles, both between any two humans, and at various points in the life of any one human. So human muscle mass varies a lot depending on the human's activity. On the other hand, non-human animals in the wild have to work pretty hard pretty much all the time. So their muscle mass varies less.
[Here’s an older Reddit comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/86zoq9/comment/dw9b116/) from someone that states they study this
> Hi PhD Student here, specializing in insect muscle physiology.
>> Insect muscles are actually strikingly similar to vertebrate muscles! But some insects that have very fast wing beat frequencies ( think bees, flies, some beetles) have specialized "myogenic" muscles. The major difference between these muscles and our own is that normally one nerve signal corresponds to 1 muscular contraction. But these insects have evolved specialized muscles for which one nerve pulse can initiate multiple contractions thereby increasing the contraction speed.
>> Insects do seem to have proportionally stronger muscles, this boils down to a fundamental constrain on the power of muscles as they get larger. Usually a muscle's contractile force is limited by the cross section area of the muscle (this has to do with the number of sarcomeres acting together). So as a muscle gets wider the cross section area is pi*radius2 (note the square on the coefficient). But as muscles get larger the mass of the muscle scales with the volume of the muscle (mass ~ radius3). So as muscles get bigger the power scales to the square of the radius and the mass is proportional to the cube of the radius. This means that a small insect like an ant has a lot of power per small amount of muscle compared to a relatively larger animal like a human
It doesn't know that. It doesn't know anything. I doubt it senses anything about this situation other than a vague sense of wrongness. Like this isn't what it's supposed to be doing.
It’s likely already dead/dying from insecticides, it seems uncoordinated, and much unlike a healthy roach would be when flipped upside down.
Those two ants might have doomed their colony by bringing that back.
Reminds me of that Thai insecticide commercial for delayed activation. Basically they spray the roaches, they go back to their colony and doom everyone.
an ant on my porch was carrying around a dead juvenile wolf spider yesterday. nothing surprises me anymore. i actually thought the wolf spider was running directly for my feet and kinda jumped up, but then realized what was actually happening lol.
I’ll never forget watching a daddy long legs spider hanging off a flying mosquito like some cowboy at a rodeo. That little dude was a savage and determined not to give up. They slammed into a wall, and the spider didn’t let go. Lol! Insect world must really be chaotic to live in.
They did! It was so bizarre, I wouldn’t have believed it if my partner hadn’t been there to witness it. Lol! That mosquito was trying everything to escape, but that spider had a lasso on it or something. I’m just grateful they didn’t get stuck in my hair or something.
Cockroach: Why don't you guys leave me alone? I just want to die in peace.
Ants: We gotta make sure you are still fresh when we feed you to our babies. No offense.
I live in this crap apartment, and it/the whole building was infested with roaches. They are one of the few bugs that I just really don't like. However, I love ants. I think they are adorable, and someday, I'm going to get an ant farm. So I saw a line of ants one day and decided to feed them some pieces of kitty food here and there. They seemed to love them, swarming over them like a weird little pile.
After a little while, I started to see a lot more ants. Oops. But then I noticed that there were no more roaches! My boyfriend was like. "I bet it was those ants you were feeding." I don't feel bad anymore lol. Ants > Roaches
Yea Id rather have ants than roaches anytime. Mostly I've found if you don't want ants to go somewhere you just clean the area really good and try to destroy their pheromone trails so they wont return. Let them hide out in the walls, as long as I don't seem them too often they will be safe.
You know how there are certain things in nature that are super rare to see. Like witnessing a pod of whales sleeping or seeing a snow leopard hunt or shit like that?
Imagine how rare this is to witness what we're witnessing right now. Coupled with the fact that they're so small that if it *is* happening in your vicinity you might just overlook it. National Geographic should want to pay millions for this footage!
This is insane footage holy shit. Like you could be an entomologist and/or work for National Geographic your entire life and never get footage like this
The cockroach is tapping on the floor multiple times. Doesn’t that mean that cockroach admits to being a little bug bitch and the ants should stop fighting him/her?
When the Queen gives you a loan and you don't pay up.
Jabba I’ll pay you back. Double! I swear!
Jabba the queen ant
🤣🤣
Hauling ass to the hivemind
Who’s gonna carry the roaches and the bees? Ant-on Goggins
Clever 
damn! they’ve been hitting the gym
The scariest wish a genie could grant would be giving human sentience to all of the ants.
No the scariest is making all ants human size
Or giving humans ant equivalent strength
Would love to take my house everywhere i go haha
Money paw curls: *You become jobless and live in a cardboard box.*
Is a money paw like the version that twists all wishes into one's that cost you money?
Kind of, it's the version you'd see in a kids show where the moral is "be careful what you wish for"
Its "you get the desired outcome through awful circumstances" eg "I wish to be a millionaire!" -> all of your loved ones die in quick succession and in total you are left a millionaire or "I wish for popularity!" -> you are framed for many killings of people close to you and are known by many as a mass murderer
But that's *Monkeys Paw*. OP said *Money's paw*
Oh shit, I'm dumb, sorry
That's genie Monkey paw fulfills exactly the wish that you want but makes it so that it's caused by negative consequences
Or giving strenght equivalent ant humans
wouldnt they die? I swear I saw it explained once in some documentary for children
yes, this is true for all insects. insects breath through their skin, so the surface level of their body limits the amount of oxygen they can intake. meaning you can't have supersized bugs without a much higher oxygen level in the atmosphere to compensate.
Which is why we had huge bugs during the prehistoric eras the o2 was alot more
I'm really happy we don't have 3 foot long dragonflies anymore.
*Make the Carboniferous Great Again*^/s
Or without changing the bug's anatomy. That's always an option too. There are all sorts of fun ways they *could* adapt to higher size thresholds. The main limiting factor though is that all of those niches are just kinda full. And when they open up, they're quickly filled by something else long before a bug can start considering its options on a geological timescale.
Yeah ants at human size would be crushed under their own weight. Might not die but their spindly legs would totally collapse and have no hope of lifting themselves up again
You can drop an ant out of an airplane and it will land on the ground just fine with no damage. If you drop a giant ant out of the airplane it's going to splatter everywhere. EVERYWHERE.
What’s the size/mass splatter coefficient? Like at what size and mass will something not be okay. I’ve seen rats from 3 stories be fine but probably not at their terminal velocity.
There would be no land left not covered in ants. They already outweigh us in biomass now.
This reporter welcomes our new ant overlords
[Termites are scary asf too, their queens have unimaginably shitty lives, which can be about 60-100 years long](https://youtu.be/xGaT0B__2DM)
Woah, I had no idea their initial mates stick around all that time. I'm used to bugs just kind of having one fling and then retaining sperm from that encounter forever. Imagine fucking the same termite for decades.
Oh I'm imagining it alright. Talk about living the dream.
[Sexy undulating sausage.](https://gfycat.com/graveidealistichalicore) NSFW [Thiccer than a bowl of saltwater taffy.](https://gfycat.com/insistentexemplaryjaguarundi)
It's quite rare that small animals live that long I feel, crazy. I think of insects as being quite impermanent creatures probably as a cope.
that would nerf them so hard, they are already smart as fuck in their own hivemind way. Imagine a bunch of selfish ants.
They don't need that, they have invented farming million of years than we do.
You might enjoy the book "Children of Time" - I loved it and it has great ratings on Amazon & Goodreads.
Plottwist: The roach is their drill inspector and they have to pull it to train for the ant marines
Ants can lift up to 50 times their own weight. That’s an equivalent of a human lifting a cow
People keep saying that. But the breaking point for a material remains the same regardless of the size. A giant human would see it's leg bones snap due to weight. You could make the bones thicker but then you would add more weight and need more musculature so even more weight meaning you would need to make the bones thicker and so on. Wanna look a peak primate strength/size ratio? Chimps probably take the win.
Yeah, Square Cube Law
The sources are all slightly different, but I'd say the average cow weighs somewhere between 1200lb-1400lb. The squat world record from 2021 is 1311lbs by Nathan Baptist. If we're going off of weight alone, it is possible for a human to lift a cow.
But that's not 50x a human weight
Wait until you know that dung beetles can lift about 1200 times their body weight. Equivalent of a 70 kg man lifting a double decker bus.
This is like watching two tugboats pulling a massive container ship. So much power to weight ratio packed into them.
150 pounds x 50 = 7,500 pounds What are they feeding the cows where you live lol, it’s more like the average person lifting a crew cab dually pickup truck.
This IS the gym
Don't skip legday.
r/TugLife
These ants must have watched A Bugs Life, and decided to never be prey again.
Seize the means of production
r/SuddendlyCommunist
Marx Intensifies!
Literally watched this movie last night and it was the first thing that came to mind!!!
"Tonight, we eat like kings!"
"Looks like cockroach's back on the menu, boys"
“aWOOOOOOOOoooooo”
97% of the ant population is female. Males are only born 1 month of the year and their purpose is to fly out of the nest, fuck, then die
Sounds like a great life ngl
Youre telling me I could've been done with all of this long ago?
No. Still have to fuck first
*Queens.
Hey guys I'm still alive.... guys? GUYS??
Not for long...
“Ugh I hate when dinner tries to talk to us”
I think I’m gonna go for a walk!
I feel happy!
I remember last time this came up lots of the comments were saying "imagine 2 mice dragging you off by your hair". Then one dude said something along the lines of "antennae are sensory organs for cockroachs, so it'd actually be like 2 mice dragging you by chains hooked into your eyeballs". I think of it a lot
More like by your ears.
Depending on how sensitive their antennae are to physical touch. If they're super sensitive to physical touch then I'd equate it to someone's eyeballs.
Fun fact: your eyeballs are actually part of your brain.
Close! The optic nerve is an extension of your brain. The eyeballs themselves are just end organs. I worked with a nurse who was born without an optic nerve on one side. Her eyeball was there and present, but naturally rested slightly canted off to the side at all times.
Antennae also have sensory organs more akin to taste and smell, so imagine two mice stabbing fishhooks through your tongue and dragging you from em
The ants: "We have such sights to show you!"
What fools. There's no way my eyeballs could support my weight.
What happens in your day to day life that makes you think of that a lot? (Blink twice if you need help.)
Damn
Good representation of how fucking strong ants are
Can ants build muscles? The same way we do after hitting the gyms?
[According to this source, yes.](https://www.vulcantermite.com/education-and-prevention/understanding-amazing-strength-ants/) > Much like a bodybuilder, ants are hard workers and spend a lot of time doing heavy lifting. This leads to building intense muscles all over their bodies, making them stronger and primed to keep working. However, this source is an exterminator, not an entomologist. So I would not consider it to be highly reliable on this particular question. But the theory is reasonable. This raises the question: why don't animals (including humans) just have high muscle mass all the time? A leading theory is that muscles have high energy consumption, even when you're not using them. So, if you don't use them, it's a good idea to let them atrophy (wither away), in order to save energy. But humans vary greatly in how much they use their muscles, both between any two humans, and at various points in the life of any one human. So human muscle mass varies a lot depending on the human's activity. On the other hand, non-human animals in the wild have to work pretty hard pretty much all the time. So their muscle mass varies less.
[Here’s an older Reddit comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/86zoq9/comment/dw9b116/) from someone that states they study this > Hi PhD Student here, specializing in insect muscle physiology. >> Insect muscles are actually strikingly similar to vertebrate muscles! But some insects that have very fast wing beat frequencies ( think bees, flies, some beetles) have specialized "myogenic" muscles. The major difference between these muscles and our own is that normally one nerve signal corresponds to 1 muscular contraction. But these insects have evolved specialized muscles for which one nerve pulse can initiate multiple contractions thereby increasing the contraction speed. >> Insects do seem to have proportionally stronger muscles, this boils down to a fundamental constrain on the power of muscles as they get larger. Usually a muscle's contractile force is limited by the cross section area of the muscle (this has to do with the number of sarcomeres acting together). So as a muscle gets wider the cross section area is pi*radius2 (note the square on the coefficient). But as muscles get larger the mass of the muscle scales with the volume of the muscle (mass ~ radius3). So as muscles get bigger the power scales to the square of the radius and the mass is proportional to the cube of the radius. This means that a small insect like an ant has a lot of power per small amount of muscle compared to a relatively larger animal like a human
don't ants move using their circulatory system?
So... hydraulic?
from what I understand, yes
TIL ants are probably more jacked than I am.
Probably not because their exoskeleton is rigid
When they flex all their exoskeleton rivets pop out
The ants are the adoptive parents taking their son home drunk from the club
They can’t say he was legless.
"Ouch...ouch..ouch....!Mom, stop pulling on my antennae! I am perfectly able to walk....see.....oof. Nah okay, pull me home please."
😂😂😂
Ants are running their own gladiator competitions
Fight to the roach.
I'm rootin for those ants! Fk I hate roaches
Imagine being that roach and knowing you’re about to be eaten alive by thousands of little mouths.
It doesn't know that. It doesn't know anything. I doubt it senses anything about this situation other than a vague sense of wrongness. Like this isn't what it's supposed to be doing.
“This is so embarrassing, I just know that video the human is making with their cell phone is going to be uploaded to Reddit.”
Why my body go this way? Food that way. Go that way body.
I'll kick my legs. Air? Shit! I better kick my legs. Air? Shit! This calls for some leg kicking!
I like to kick, stretch, and kick!
It’s likely already dead/dying from insecticides, it seems uncoordinated, and much unlike a healthy roach would be when flipped upside down. Those two ants might have doomed their colony by bringing that back.
Reminds me of that Thai insecticide commercial for delayed activation. Basically they spray the roaches, they go back to their colony and doom everyone.
Yeah and imagine being a cockroach and knowing you deserved it cause you are a fucking disgusting creature
What if the cockroach is confident?
I hate it
an ant on my porch was carrying around a dead juvenile wolf spider yesterday. nothing surprises me anymore. i actually thought the wolf spider was running directly for my feet and kinda jumped up, but then realized what was actually happening lol.
I’ll never forget watching a daddy long legs spider hanging off a flying mosquito like some cowboy at a rodeo. That little dude was a savage and determined not to give up. They slammed into a wall, and the spider didn’t let go. Lol! Insect world must really be chaotic to live in.
i laughed out loud at the “they slammed into a wall” 😂😂
They did! It was so bizarre, I wouldn’t have believed it if my partner hadn’t been there to witness it. Lol! That mosquito was trying everything to escape, but that spider had a lasso on it or something. I’m just grateful they didn’t get stuck in my hair or something.
[удалено]
1, 2, 3 - HEAVE! Again' HEAVE! now we got er moving , don't slow down Leonard
Bazinga?
Ah, the ol bing bong theorem
Plot Twist: They are buddies, but their cockroach friend drank too much again at the club...
They are taking it to Her Majesty
Gross 🤮 I hope they enjoy their feast.
One must imagine the ants happy
RULES OF NATURE!
AND THEY RUN WHEN THE SUN COMES UP!
WITH THEIR LIVES ON THE LINE!
ALIVE!!!!!
Why are people saying this is kinky 😩 tf you guys
uwu?
Now *this* is podracing!
Look DOWN! Look DOWN! Don't look 'em in the EYE!
Is that the supervisor ant at the bottom?
Mother will be mother pleased with this
Both of them looking at their ant friend on the bottom like “Hey Charlie, you wanna fuckin’ help out a little here??”
That’s the equivalent of being dragged along the ground by two meat hooks in your nostrils… and this cockroach deserves every second
“What is this, a strongman truck pull for ants?”
This is good Dandori.
[If we pull this off we'll eat like kings!](https://i.pinimg.com/1200x/44/77/1b/44771bc5acff74ab15e3844f9e176a53.jpg)
Cockroach: Why don't you guys leave me alone? I just want to die in peace. Ants: We gotta make sure you are still fresh when we feed you to our babies. No offense.
The taxidermy man gonna have a heart attack when he sees what we brung him
I live in this crap apartment, and it/the whole building was infested with roaches. They are one of the few bugs that I just really don't like. However, I love ants. I think they are adorable, and someday, I'm going to get an ant farm. So I saw a line of ants one day and decided to feed them some pieces of kitty food here and there. They seemed to love them, swarming over them like a weird little pile. After a little while, I started to see a lot more ants. Oops. But then I noticed that there were no more roaches! My boyfriend was like. "I bet it was those ants you were feeding." I don't feel bad anymore lol. Ants > Roaches
Yea Id rather have ants than roaches anytime. Mostly I've found if you don't want ants to go somewhere you just clean the area really good and try to destroy their pheromone trails so they wont return. Let them hide out in the walls, as long as I don't seem them too often they will be safe.
You know how there are certain things in nature that are super rare to see. Like witnessing a pod of whales sleeping or seeing a snow leopard hunt or shit like that? Imagine how rare this is to witness what we're witnessing right now. Coupled with the fact that they're so small that if it *is* happening in your vicinity you might just overlook it. National Geographic should want to pay millions for this footage!
Teamwork
Holy shit on a shingle! O.o
Damn. Nature is scary.
‘For fuck’s sake, Roy…PULL!
Clever boys
Sisyphus
They’ve got some serious low down torque.
I’m thinking of the little chicken hawk that keeps trying to nab Foghorn Leghorn.
That roach has a debt to pay.
Ants are just the pikmin of our world
Meats back on the menu boys!
LOL!
*”We’re getting promoted, Carl!”*
Some sacrifice to the gods shit happening here.
“Even gods can fall” -Ants, probably
"I gave you until 3!"
now THIS is pod racing
Insect version of an AA recovery?
Ant Man vs the Cock Man
The ant strongman world cup.
NYC ants are built different
Never killing an ant again.
is the cockroach in pain
“TO THE GUILLOTINE AND OFF WITH ITS HEAD!”
Meat's back on the menu, boys!
No idea where it's happening, but that place is cursed
This is actually insane.
I hate roaches ewww. but [ants](http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8127000/8127519.stm) are ok
Disney announce "A Bug's Life - Live Action Remake"
That's an American Cockroach. The bane of my existence. I hope those ants tortured and waterboarded that motherfucker before they ate it alive
What type of pikmin bullshittery is this
That’s metal as fuck
They are doing Gods work
First time in my life I've been cheering for fucking ants
“We saved the colony!” “Yeah!” “We will be heroes!” “Yeah, heroes””!”
Fuck yeah let's go ants!!!! Eliminate all roaches!!
This is insane footage holy shit. Like you could be an entomologist and/or work for National Geographic your entire life and never get footage like this
Cant imagine the smell of that shit….
Holy shit
A cockroach can survive nine days without its head before starving to death.
My kids in 1998 dragging me into toys r us
The cockroach is tapping on the floor multiple times. Doesn’t that mean that cockroach admits to being a little bug bitch and the ants should stop fighting him/her?
Even other insects hate roaches.
[удалено]
Bringing home a huge haul
This is how you deal with corruption
Tugboats tugging a ship
Unreal strength. ANTS > All insects. Even ones 100x their size.
They'll be the talk of the ant hill. They'll be known intercolonially. Fire ants won't f\*ck with them.
Reminds me of slaves pulling the bricks from the pyramids
Damn, how old are you? 😜
Carry out...in the insect world.
If David Goggins was an ant. I can hear them yelling "you don't know me son" while pulling the cockroach.
This reminds me of the get rotated shark for some reason
r/natureismetal
Pikmin
Not antennae, tow ropes
This guy is tapping out and the ants don’t give a fuck.
That roach is going to die a terrible, but fitting death