In “Weightlifters No Match for Insects” (August 4, 2012), CEH Headlines offers “For Olympic season, here are more comparisons between human and animal capabilities.”
Weightlifting: The BBC News showed that, as remarkable as it is for a human to lift 2 or 3 times his body weight, leaf-cutter ants do better: 50x their body weight – and they’re not even contenders for the gold. A male rhinoceros beetle can lift 850 times its own weight – equivalent to a human world champion “lifting six double-decker buses weighing over 8000 kg.” There’s more: “But, the species to beat is a tiny mite that has been shown holding forces of up to 1180 times its weight and even pull 530 times its weight on a vertical surface.” More, way More.
Humph. We invented popcorn and movies, traffic accidents and litigation. What animal can match the sheer genius of that?