INSECT SAMSONS.

Taranaki Daily News, 23 September 1921, Page 3

INSECT SAMSONS.

STRONGEST OF CREATED BEINGS. I. have just been watering a couple of “serton” or burying beetles interring a defunct field mouse, writes a Daily Mail contributor. They had. got about halfwav' through with the job when I first epotted 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. Coming into the house, 1 picked up my Daily Mail and read an account, of rhe fpaUA 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 fifteen hundred pounds can pull on the level ft 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 twenty times its own weight, a caterpillar has been shown to be capable of pulling twenty-five 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 horn-beetle, weighing two grammes, this insect was proved capable of alternately raising and lowering a piece of stick weighing two hundred times as much as itself. In order to rival such a feat a man would have to lift a railway truck laden with about eight tons of coal.

Tn 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, lie i to dirt a width just

under half a mile. The man who could jump like a grasshopper would be able to cover the distance between. Ludgare Circus and Trafalgar Square in a hop, skip and a jump. IVe admire—and with good reason—the. amazing flight of auch birds as the ewallow and the swift. But watch a dragon fly hawking over a pond, and you feel that here is a much more marvellous performance. The “hover fly” is possessed of a speed even more miraculous, for the eye cannot follow .its startling dashes through the air* 1 do not know whether anyone has ever calculated the speed of the “hover fly, - ’ but 1 should imagine that it must exceed that of any other living thing. -And the muscle power neeeesary to drive it at such a speed must be truly amazing.

In the matter of architecture and engineering, insects are as far ahead of man as they are in muscular strength. The termite or white ant Vaises its hills to a height of fifteen feet, and constructs them so strongly that even a heavy beast like a buffalo can stand on them without breaking them down.

The pyramid of Cheops is but ninety times the height of a man. but these anthills are more than six hundred times tKe height of their tiny builders.