Ant Power

Q. Where does that famous ant that can lift something like 20 times its weight get its power? Is it muscle fibers or some sort of hydraulic fluid?

A. Ants’ muscles are not unlike those of a mammal in many ways. They have muscle fibers of various kinds that contract and expand at varying speeds and strengths. The muscles are attached either directly to internal protrusions of its external skeleton, called apodemes, or indirectly, by filaments attached to the connection points. Scientists often note that an ant’s strength to lift many times its weight actually depends on its small size, not on any special muscular equipment. With an exoskeleton, the smaller the insect is, the less burden it has in supporting its own tissue, and thus it can routinely lift proportionally larger burdens.A 1999 paper by researchers in Würzburg, Germany, in The Journal of Experimental Biology, examined the large muscle that closes the mandible of a worker ant. It has two types of muscle fiber: some with long contractile units, called sarcomeres, and some with short sarcomeres. Depending on their shape and biochemistry, the fibers contract either slowly but powerfully or relatively rapidly but less forcefully. The distribution of the fibers, the ratio of slow fibers to fast ones and their attachment and arrangement determine the speed and force with which each species can close its jaws. Link