alright, trying to figure out the exact figures needed for upscaling an ant has proved to be overly difficult due to lack of public information, so instead, i'm going to downscale an animal which we have a lot more data on: humans.
the average male body weight is 62kg
assuming we're comparing ourselves to the ants then let's assume we work our asses off daily like ants, but we don't "work out"- we're not body builders, we just have intensive jobs. so our average is more in shape than the actual human average, but we aren't incredibly bulky
according to this site, we should be able to lift ~130kg,
or about 2x our own body weight, following my criteria for our strength under ant conditions.
now let's take the square-cube law and apply it so that we become similar to ants in stature.
as explained
here, muscle strength scales by the square while mass scales by the cube. the avg black worker ant is 4mm long. the average human male is 173cm tall. let's become 4mm tall - that's about 0.23% of our original height. but now we take that percent and square it for our strength. 130kg x 0.00000529 = 687.7mg. now we take the percent and cube it for our mass. 62kg x 0.000000012167 = 0.754354 mg, or approx. 30.17416% of an ant's mass. this makes sense - an ant has more limbs than we do, and has a lot more curves. structurally speaking, they're less efficient.
687.7mg / 0.754354mg = 911.640953717.
we can lift over 900x our own weight at an ant's scale.
meanwhile, an ant can lift about 100x its own mass- 250mg. despite having become the size of an ant - and 1/3 the weight of one - we remain almost 3x stronger.
note: articles talking about ants withstanding 1,000x/5,000x/etc their weight are talking about how much weight it takes to make an ant's joints fail, not how much an ant can carry. it's like if we tested humans not by how much they can deadlift, but how much a hydraulic winch can pull on their legs in until they tear off of the torso.
in short, ants BTFO.
but it gets even better.
you see, ants breathe using spiracles. we, however, use lungs.
note how low the surface area of the spiracles are in comparison to the surface area of human lungs.so not only would we be stronger than them, we'd also have a LOT more stamina
ALSO: i made a major mistake. because I couldn't find a more scientific measurement of human strength, we never scaled the portion of human strength being used to hold ourselves upright. in other words, i should've added 62kg to our starting strength. but i've already gone the whole nine yards, and i'd really just be making us look even more handicappedly strong at that scale, so i won't bother.
tl;dr ants suck human rooster after ant-sized humans tear the ants' mandibles off bare handed
