“A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.”

June 15, 2016 9:10 PM

We Solved The Mystery Of What Will Happen When An Ant Falls From The Empire State Building By Dami Lee [The Verge] Last week, I asked a question that I had already accepted in my defeated heart as having no real answer: if you drop an ant from the top of the Empire State Building, will it die? And the other, more pressing question: was this Korean TV show from the '90s lying to me when it said that ants would explode because of changing air pressure as they were moved to the top of a skyscraper? Okay, so here's the conclusion I've reached: no, the ants won't die. And they won't explode when they get to the top, either.

WHY #1 – Terminal velocity

All objects, when falling through the air, have a terminal velocity that depends on their size, shape, and mass. The terminal velocity of an ant (6.4 km/h, according to the physics department at the University of Illinois) is going to differ a lot from the terminal velocity of a human dude (about 200 km/h, which I hope this person only experiences from hobbies like skydiving and not free-falling from the Empire State Building).This poetic 1928 essay by J.B.S. Haldane, "On Being the Right Size," explains:

“To the mouse and any smaller animal it presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force.”

WHY #2 – This German TV show for kids said so [YouTube] [German]

A bunch of German readers directed me to an episode of this German kids' TV show, Die Sendung mit der Maus (The Show with the Mouse) that explored this very topic.

WHY #3 – I asked an actual ant scientist and he said it was a bunch of hooey

Michael Kaspari is an ecologist at the University of Oklahoma who has studied the aerial maneuverability of wingless ants. The study found that when ants are faced with a predator, they will jump into thin air from high branches and use their legs to maneuver through the air and glide back toward the tree trunk. When I asked him about the possibility of ants exploding in high altitudes, he gave the most satisfying, amusing answer I could hope for:

“Every biological bone in my body says the notion of an ant popping somewhere along the express elevator’s trip to the observation deck is hooey. Just because our ear’s pop doesn’t mean the ants do. In fact our ear’s popping is an *adaptation* to adjust to varying air pressure. Ants were crawling between the toes of the dinosaurs. They can handle a little change in air pressure. Moreover, a mountaintop in the Great Smokey Mountains (elevation 3500 feet) and almost twice as high as the Empire State Building’s observation deck (1250 feet) has around 62 species and subspecies of ants. I’ve never seen one of those species pop.”

posted by Fizz (4 comments total)

Does the horse splash as in he gets gibbed, or does he hit the ground so hard the ground behaves like liquid?
posted by Gymnopedist at 9:28 PM on June 15, 2016

So the ant's fine. What about the guy the quarter lands on?
posted by notyou at 9:50 PM on June 15, 2016

A horse splashes, an old rat dies;
a man is broken on the floor.
The angel opens her eyes...
with my sincerest apologies to Ed Kowalczyk and also everyone else
posted by jordemort at 10:08 PM on June 15, 2016

if you drop an ant from the top of the Empire State Building, will it die?

I guarantee it. Eventually.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:09 PM on June 15, 2016 [1 favorite]