What If You Were the Size of an Ant?

It's raining. You're standing in your own backyard, every blade of grass is taller than a lamppost, and a raindrop the size of a water balloon just smashed down next to you. The back door is only fifty feet away. But right now you're the size of an ant, and fifty feet might as well be a mile. From now on, you can shrink to the size of an ant whenever you want. One crumb of cereal is breakfast, the bookshelf is a cliff, you can jump off it without a scratch, and hide and seek is over forever. There's just one catch: you can only grow back if you're completely dry. We follow the consequences all the way: the fun, the clever uses, the robin, the spider web, the cat, being cold all the time, water that sticks like jelly, a voice nobody can hear, and a world that never looks down. Plus the real science of being tiny: the square cube law, why falling doesn't hurt (and J. B. S. Haldane's famous mouse), mosquitoes that survive raindrops, the problem of where all your atoms would go, the twenty quadrillion ants on Earth, and the fire ants that build living rafts. So... would you want to be the size of an ant? Tell us in the comments. 00:00 Stuck in the rain 00:24 The pillow mountain 00:45 The rules 01:15 Breakfast for a year 01:28 The bookshelf cliff 01:42 Jumping off the bookshelf 01:59 The sandbox, the sunflower, the dog 02:15 Under the fridge 02:27 Inside the TV remote 02:37 Hide and seek: over 02:48 Meet Pebble 03:18 Where it goes wrong 03:22 Everything wants to eat you 03:39 Always cold 03:54 Water is a nightmare 04:09 Nobody can hear you 04:20 School is four days away 04:32 Nobody looks down 04:49 Real science 04:57 The square cube law 05:14 Haldane's mouse 05:35 Mosquitoes vs raindrops 05:51 Where do your atoms go? 06:19 20 quadrillion ants 06:40 The living raft 06:54 Bending the rules 07:04 Back to the backyard 07:15 Pebble comes back 07:31 Across the patio 07:47 Home, dry, and big again 08:04 Looking down 08:20 Why small things matter 08:35 Would you? Sources: Strength vs weight and the square cube law: Galileo, "Two New Sciences" (1638); J. B. S. Haldane, "On Being the Right Size" (1926) The mouse, rat, man and horse down a mine shaft: J. B. S. Haldane, "On Being the Right Size" (1926) Ants carrying 10-50x their body weight: a commonly cited range that varies by species (VERIFY a citable source before posting) Shrews eating almost nonstop to stay warm: small-mammal metabolism (VERIFY a citable source before posting) Mosquitoes surviving raindrop impacts: Dickerson et al., "Mosquitoes survive raindrop collisions by virtue of their low mass," PNAS (2012) About 7 x 10^27 atoms in a human body: standard estimate for a ~70 kg adult About 20 quadrillion ants, outweighing wild birds and wild mammals combined: Schultheiss et al., "The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth," PNAS (2022) Ant fungus farming beginning around 60 million years ago: Schultz et al., "The coevolution of fungus-ant agriculture," Science (2024), which dates it to about 66 million years ago (VERIFY) Fire ant rafts: Mlot, Tovey and Hu, "Fire ants self-assemble into waterproof rafts to survive floods," PNAS (2011) Next time: What if you woke up as tall as a building? #WhatIf #AntSized #Science #Animation #Ants