Ant
Have you ever seen an ant carrying something, like a flower or some food? Consider this: ants can lift things 100 times their own weight. That’s like a 45 pound kid carrying a 4500 pound rhinoceros! Not only that, but ants can do this while walking straight up walls or hanging upside down from ceilings. How do they manage to stick so well to things? When ants put their feet down, pads on
their feet automatically inflate, like balloons, and excrete small amounts of sticky fluid. That works great for connecting to a wall or ceiling, but how do they then run so quickly across a surface?
That is, if ants are so sticky, how do they also unstick from surfaces? Unlike you and I, ants have foldable feet. When an
ant wants to unstick from a wall or ceiling, it deflates its foot until it folds together, like a book, reducing the amount of sticky surface touching the wall.
Learn about my special feet!