A dung beetle about 10 millimetres long, a species called Onthophagus taurus, has been measured pulling 1,141 times its own body weight.
It is one of the strongest animals, relative to its size, ever measured.
An animal’s strength depends mainly on the cross-sectional area of its muscles, which grows with the square of its size.
The beetle is often crowned the world’s strongest insect, and it is certainly among the strongest animals for its size.
The safest and still remarkable statement is that this beetle is one of the strongest animals ever measured relative to its body mass.
A dung beetle about 10 millimetres long, a species called Onthophagus taurus, has been measured pulling 1,141 times its own body weight. Scale that up to human size and it is as if a 70-kilogram person dragged around 80 tonnes, roughly the weight of six double-decker buses. It is one of the strongest animals, relative to its size, ever measured.
The number is real and comes from a careful experiment. The eye-watering human comparison is a way of picturing it, and, as we will see, the reason a beetle can do this while a person cannot comes down to simple physics.
How you measure a beetle’s strength
The figure comes from work by Rob Knell at Queen Mary University of London and Leigh Simmons at the University of Western Australia, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Their method was ingenious in its simplicity. They glued a fine thread to a beetle’s back, placed the beetle in an artificial tunnel, and ran the thread over a pulley to a small pot. Then they let water drip slowly into the pot, steadily increasing the load, until the beetle could no longer hold on and was pulled backwards. The strongest male resisted right up to 1,141 times its own body weight before it finally gave way. That is the number in the headline.
Doing the sums
The arithmetic behind the comparison is straightforward. Multiply 1,141 by the 70 kilograms of an average adult and you get close to 80 tonnes. A double-decker bus weighs somewhere around 12 or 13 tonnes, so 80 tonnes is roughly six of them. A person with this beetle’s relative strength could, in principle, drag a fully loaded articulated lorry down the street and keep going.
It should be said plainly that this is an illustration, not a claim about people. No human can do anything remotely like it. The point of the comparison is to convey just how extreme the beetle’s feat is when measured against its tiny body.
Why small things are so strong
The beetle is not breaking the laws of physics. It is exploiting them, and the key is a matter of geometry known as scaling.
An animal’s strength depends mainly on the cross-sectional area of its muscles, which grows with the square of its size. Its weight depends on its volume, which grows with the cube. As a creature gets smaller, its weight falls away much faster than its strength does, so small animals end up proportionally far stronger than large ones. A beetle is not stronger than you in absolute terms; it is stronger for its size precisely because it is small. Blow the same beetle up to the size of a person and that very scaling would strip away its advantage, leaving it unable to lift anything like 1,141 times its new, vastly greater weight.
Why the beetle needs it
This strength is not a party trick, it is a weapon. Female Onthophagus taurus dig tunnels in the soil beneath a pat of dung, and males follow them down to mate. When a male finds a tunnel already occupied by a rival, the two lock their horns and try to shove each other out.
The experiment was really a way of measuring that. Pulling a beetle backwards out of a tunnel mimics exactly what a rival tries to do, and the beetle’s ability to brace against the tunnel walls and resist is the same ability that wins it a mate underground. The species even comes in two male forms, large horned “fighters” built for this shoving contest and smaller hornless males that avoid the fights and try to sneak past. The brute strength belongs to the fighters, and it exists because generations of tunnel battles have favoured it.
Is it really the strongest?
The beetle is often crowned the world’s strongest insect, and it is certainly among the strongest animals for its size. A few honest qualifications are worth keeping in mind, though. The figure of 1,141 times is the peak recorded for the very strongest individual, not a typical value, and a beetle’s strength depends heavily on how well it was fed as a larva, so a poorly nourished one performs far below that.
The title of outright champion also depends on how you measure, since pulling, lifting and holding are different feats, and some other tiny creatures, certain mites in particular, have been reported gripping comparable or even greater multiples of their weight. The safest and still remarkable statement is that this beetle is one of the strongest animals ever measured relative to its body mass.
Why it matters
Beyond the sheer novelty, the dung beetle is a neat lesson in scaling, the same physics that sets limits on how large animals and machines can grow and that lets insects perform stunts impossible at our size. It is also a reminder that evolution builds extreme abilities when competition rewards them, in this case an underground shoving match for the right to mate. The beetle’s power is not a miracle. It is what you get when you are very strong, and very, very small.
