Is it true that an ant can carry loads equal to many times her own body weight?

All insects are strong and even the weakest can pull five times his own weight. The champions seem to be the sturdy beetles. A certain bitsy beetle was hitched to a load and proved able to lift 850 times his own weight.

The average insect has more muscles than we do and, gram for gram, his muscles may be 10 times stronger. But the real secret of his strength lies in his size. It is possible to concentrate greater muscular co ordination in a tiny body. If he were expanded to human size, his muscle power would be reduced to human proportions.

This statement is true in more ways than one. The industrious little ant can carry her weight in the matter of duties. In other words, she does her fair share of the work for her ant community. When it comes to heaving and hauling, lifting and shifting, this sturdy character can certainly carry her own weight. In fact, she can carry many more times than her own weight    apparently with the greatest of ease.
An ant can lift and carry 50 times her own minuscule weight    and she performs this feat with her mandible jaws. The insect world has an abundance of champion athletes and the tiny ant is not the champion weight lifter. Bees can do almost as well and certain beetles can do very much better. However, verified records are not easy to obtain. One cannot be sure that an ant is doing her very best. For a report to qualify, the feat must be observed and photographed by a reliable expert, and the results weighed with fine instruments..
One such report concerns a harvester ant, caught in the act of removing a stone from a tunnel in her nest. She heaved up the solid stone to ground level, then used her tough little mandible pincers to hoist it shoulder high and tote it a safe distance from the doorway. The operation was photographed, then the mighty midget and her burden were weighed. This ant, small enough to sprawl on a penny, lifted 52 times her own weight. If a human weight lifter had comparable strength, he could hoist a load of almost four tons.
This athletic ant may or may not have been a champion. Worker ants often carry loads equal to 30 to 50 times their own weight. For bulky construction jobs, worker ants may toil together in teams. Certain parasol ants neatly slice sections from large leaves and two or more workers line up and carry these wide loads above their heads. Other teams reach up and pull down foliage to form tunnels. Meantime assistant teams bring young larva ants to spin silken thread to sew the leaves together.
All worker ants perform stupendous feats during their daily duties. Earth and pebbles must be moved to build the nest which may be four to eight feet deep. Its underground tunnels and galleries are in constant need of cleaning and repairs. All this earth work is possible because each little ant is strong enough to heave, haul floating in a solution of precisely balanced chemicals. It transports oxygen fuel and waste carbon dioxide between the lungs and the living cells. The body keeps all its water working day and night and the supply needs constant replenishing. The lungs breath out moisture through the nose and mouth, the skin perspires more liquid, and quantities of water flush waste materials out through the kidneys. Every day we need to take in about two quarts to replace the loss and maintain the body’s 65 per cent to 70 per cent water content.
We drink much of our daily supply as plain water or in milk and other liquids which are mostly water. But a surprising amount comes from the food we eat. A slice of bread is 35 per cent water; an egg is 70 per cent water. The water content in a potato is 80 per cent. Lettuce and cabbage are 90 per cent water and 95 per cent of a juicy tomato is actually water.