INSECT SAMSONS

Otago Witness, Issue 3524, 27 September 1921, Page 36

INSECT SAMSONS

STRONGEST OF CREATED BEINGS. I have just been watching a couple of “sexton” or burying beetles interring a defunct field mouse, writes a Daily Mail contributor. They had got about half-way through with the job when 1 first spotted them, and they finished the work in a little over a quarter of an hour. The feat, I should say, was equal to two men digging a grave for a large elephant in half an hour. Coining into the house I picked up my Daily Mail and read an account of the feats of strength performed by those two redoubtable protagonists, Carpentier and Dempsey. Inevitably I began mentally to compare the relative strength of men and insects, with results very much to the disadvantage of the former. Insects, indeed, in proportion to their size and weight are infinitely the strongest of created beings. A horse weighing 15001 b can pull on the level a weight of two tons and a-half. That is, a load roughly equal to about five times its own weight, for we must, of course, allow for the weight- of the cart. But a bee can draw more than 20 times its own weight, a caterpillar has been shown to bo capable of pulling 25 times its own weight, while a blow-fly has been harnessed and found .able to drag more than one hundred and fifty times its own tiny weight. In an experiment made with a small hornbeetle, weighing two grammes, this insect was proved capable of alternatively raising and lowering a piece of siiclc weighing iv.n hundred times as much as itself. In order to rival such a feat a man would have io lift a railway truck laden with about eight tons of coal. In feats of agility the insect is equally in advance of mankind. Several of the smaller species of grasshoppers are able to jump as much as two hundred times their own length. Man's best effort is about four times his own length. To emulate the grasshopper, he would have to clear a width of just under half a mile. The man who could jump like a grasshopper would be able to cover the distance between Ludgate Circus and Trafalgar Square in a hop, skip, and a jump. We admire —and with good reason—the amazing flight of such birds as the swallow and the swift. But. watch a dragon flv hawking over a pond, and you must feel that here is a much more marvellous performance. The “hover fly” is possessed of a speed even more miraculous, for the eve cannot follow its startling dashes through the air. I do not know whether anyone has ever calculated the speed of ihe “hover fly,” but I should imagine that it must exceed that of any other living thing. And the muscle power necessary to drive it at such speed that must be truly amazing. In tlie matter of architecture and enginering, insects are as far ahead of man as they are in muscular strength. The termite' or white ant raises its hills to a height of 15ft and constructs them so strongly that even a heavy boast like the buffalo can stand on them without breaking them down. The pyramid of Cheops is hut 90 times the height, of a man, but these anthills are more than 600 times the height of their tiny builders.