Why can small bugs grab and hold items thousands of times heavier than their own weight?
Why can small bugs grab and hold items thousands of times heavier than their own weight? To put this in perspective, I pulled a tick off of myself this morning and noticed my skin stretched way out from my arm before it let go. I know that the force required for it to stretch my skin like that was thousands of times greater than it's own body weight. A human can at best, hold maybe 2 to 3 or 4 times it's weight, but not thousands of times it's weight. Not even hundreds of times its weight.
While we are on the issue, how come you can take, say, an ant and drop it from 10ft up and it just lands and goes on with it's business like nothing happened. 10 feet up is approximately 600 times the length of the ant. If you took a human and dropped them from a height of 600 times their body length, they would definitely die. Even at a height of 3 or 4 times the length of a person, the person would be hurt.
Even if you can explain the part about falling and gravity, that still doesn't explain the strength differential! What explains this radically different phenomena?