4 ms·
They walk over each other too. We can't do that without causing minor or major injuries
by z3phyr 7y ago
They walk over each other too. We can't do that without causing minor or major injuries
- chongli 7y agoYeah exactly. Ants also move far slower than humans do. Even the world’s fastest ant only moves about 1 m/s, considerably slower than the average human walking speed of 1.4 m/s. People like to marvel at ants by taking everything they do and scaling it up. That’s not a valid thing to do, physically speaking. Kinetic energy is proportional to mass times velocity squared. Compared to humans, ants with negligible mass and very low velocity have minuscule kinetic energy when they collide.
- ashton314 7y agoThere are ants that move at 1 m/s?! That's terrifying. What kind of ant is that? Will it hurt if it bites me? How can I avoid this ant? ;-) Sure, not as fast as humans, but seeing something small (and potentially with big poisonous pincers) move at that speed is a little freaky.
- chongli 7y agoThe Saharan silver ant [1]. It’s actually only about 0.86 m/s but still quite fast for an ant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saharan_silver_ant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saharan_silver_ant
- EamonnMR 7y agoThe bit about using heat-shock proteins in anticipation of rather than response to (like every other organism) extreme heat is absolutely wild.
- k_ 7y agoSome ants living in sahara. I think I saw that somewhere on hn recently.
- quakeguy 7y agoBecause ants are small... And lightweight, I can’t remember right now the term for volume vs mass when compared, but you can throw an ant from the Empire State Building, and it will land like dropped from 2 inch height.
- zentiggr 7y agoI imagine an ant's drag coefficient is fairly high... and combined with the relative strength of the exoskeleton, they may as well be a powered armor trooper equivalent.
- scott_s 7y agoTaken from the Wikipedia page on terminal velocity, and quoted from the biologist J. B. S. Haldane: "To the mouse and any smaller animal [gravity] presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object."
- quakeguy 7y agoThx, that was the quote i was looking for.