3 ms·
Yeah 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
by chongli 7y ago
Yeah 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.