Why do small animals appear to have super powers?
Termites can build towers a thousand times their own height, ants can lift objects many times their own size – are these “super” animals which through sheer luck happen to be too small to threaten us? Not really – much of their apparent “super” power stems from the very fact that they are so small compared to us. As animals get larger their muscles get more powerful but this occurs at a different rate to the way the objects those muscles need to lift get heavier as they get larger. If you double the length or width of a muscle then, very roughly, the strength increases in proportion to the cross-sectional area of the muscle, so a muscle twice as wide and long could become four times as strong. But if you double the linear dimensions of an object that muscle might lift, that object becomes eight times as heavy, because you increase the volume by a factor of eight in doubling the width, depth and height. So a flea can jump hundreds of times its own height, but if it was a hundred times l
