How Strong Are Ants? How Much Weight an Ant Can Carry

How much weight can an ant carry?

The often-quoted figure is that ants can lift 10–50 times their own body weight. That range is reasonable for some species in some situations, but the real numbers vary widely.

Carrying while walking is harder than simply holding. An ant on a trail has to balance the load, climb over obstacles and keep moving for long distances. Many species prefer to cooperate on big items: groups of workers can drag prey many hundreds of times the weight of a single ant.

Leafcutter ants: the famous load carriers

Leafcutter ants of the American tropics are the classic example. Medium-sized workers cut pieces of leaves and carry them home, held upright in their jaws like sails. Each fragment weighs several times the ant’s own weight, and the ants may carry it 100 m (330 ft) or more along cleared trails.

Load size is a trade-off. Bigger pieces bring more material for the colony’s fungus garden, but they slow the ant down. Studies of leafcutter trails suggest workers often cut pieces smaller than the maximum they could carry, keeping traffic flowing quickly.

The ant neck test

In 2014, engineers at Ohio State University studied the Allegheny mound ant (Formica exsectoides), a North American wood ant. Using a centrifuge, they measured how much force the joint between head and thorax could take. The neck withstood forces of about 5,000 times the ant’s body weight before it failed.

This does not mean an ant can lift 5,000 times its weight. It shows how strong the ant’s body structure is, which lets the muscles of its head and jaws grip and carry heavy loads without the neck breaking.

Why small animals are so strong

The real secret of ant strength is size, explained by the square-cube law. When an animal gets bigger, its weight increases with its volume, roughly the cube of its length. But the strength of a muscle depends on its cross-sectional area, which increases only with the square of its length.

So if you shrank a person to the size of an ant, they would become relatively much stronger compared with their tiny weight. Scale an ant up to human size, and its weight would increase thousands of times faster than its strength. Its legs would buckle, and its exoskeleton, the hard outer shell, would be far too heavy to move. Giant ants in science fiction could not exist.

Ants also have other advantages. Their muscles attach directly to the inside of the exoskeleton, giving efficient leverage. Six legs give a stable stance, and many ants have sticky pads and claws that grip surfaces, letting them hold heavy loads without sliding.

Strength in numbers

An ant colony’s real power comes from teamwork. Wood ants like the red wood ant work together to haul caterpillars and beetles back to the mound. Army ants of the tropics form living bridges, and fire ants link bodies to build floating rafts that can survive floods.

Weaver ants of Asia, Africa and Australia show cooperation at its most striking. Chains of workers pull leaves together, holding them in place while others glue the edges with silk produced by their larvae. No single ant could bend the leaf, but a team can.

Ants vs other strong animals

Relative to body weight, ants are among the strongest animals, but not the champions. In a study reported in 2010, a male horned dung beetle (Onthophagus taurus) was able to pull about 1,141 times its own weight. Rhinoceros beetles are also famous for strength; see how strong is a Hercules beetle?

In absolute terms, large animals are far stronger. An elephant can carry hundreds of kilograms, but that load is only a small fraction of its own weight. For a ranking that compares both kinds of strength, see our list of the strongest animals.

Myths and facts

Myth: Ants can lift 100 times their weight as a rule. Fact: Only some ants in some situations come close, usually when holding a weight on a surface. Typical carried loads are much smaller.

Myth: A human with an ant’s strength could lift a car. Fact: Strength does not scale up with size. A human-sized ant would be relatively weak, not super strong.