Five scientific reasons why Ant-Man is astonishing

In the superhero community, it usually takes one of three things to gain respect: an awesomely timeless costume (see: Spider-Man), an otherworldly power set (see: Superman), or an intimidating name and reputation (see: Ghost Rider, though to be fair, it’s kind of difficult to look at a flaming skull in a biker jacket and not feel like pissing your pants). 

 

Unfortunately, this means that life as a costumed crime-fighter would absolutely suck for you if (a) the most iconic part of your costume is a hand-me-down that looks like a cross between a grasshopper’s head and a pretzel, (b) your super-power literally makes you smaller than everyone else, and (c) you’re named after a diminutive insect that only really manages to scare people who picked the wrong spot for a picnic (which is selling them short, really, but we’ll get into that later).

 

That hasn’t stopped Ant-Man—a hero who first crawled into comic book readers’ radars in January 1962’s Tales to Astonish #27—from trying, though.

 

 

There have been three “generations” of heroic Ant-Men in the comics so far; unfortunately, they’ve each been rewarded by life with nothing but an anthill’s worth of suffering and disrespect for their trouble.

 

The first hero to wear the mantle, scientist Hank Pym, was actually a founding member of the Avengers; sadly, when your teammates are a walking weapon of mass destruction, the God of Thunder, and a billionaire playboy philanthropist with jet boots, the ability to fit through the eye of a needle isn’t exactly the most impressive superpower ever. This led to a string of mental disorders, as well as one brand-new costumed identity after another (Giant-Man, Goliath, Yellowjacket, and even the Wasp—a codename he adopted to honor his wife, whom everyone thought had already kicked the bucket at the time).

Oh, and his most notable accomplishment? The unintentional creation of one of the most terrible super-villains the Avengers had ever faced: Ultron, an indestructible mechanical menace hell-bent on eradicating the human race. Good job, Pym!

 

The second guy, Scott Lang—who also happens to be Marvel’s latest movie superstar, by the way—was a down-on-his-luck thief who was forced to steal the Ant-Man suit to save his daughter’s life. After receiving Pym’s blessing, Lang carried on as Ant-Man, and truly lived up to Pym’s legacy of tough breaks upon joining the Avengers. At some point, Lang was blown up by the reanimated corpse of a teammate, and then came back to life just in time to see his beloved daughter die in his arms while following in his superhero footsteps. (She got better, by the way. Comics!)

 

The third guy, Eric O’Grady, was an irredeemable pervert and all-around jerkface who was promptly offed and replaced by an evil robot just as he was beginning to have a change of heart. Nowadays, Lang is back in the suit, running around and still trying to get people to respect a man who named himself after an ant.

 

Well, today’s Lang’s lucky day, because science has decided to throw him a bone. Five, to be exact.

 

1. Ants are super-strong.

 

Ah, and those bones I mentioned above? They were probably thrown by ants.

 

 

Lang’s suit in the “Ant-Man” movie is described as “a super-suit with the astonishing ability to shrink in scale but increase in strength.” In the comics, Ant-Man retained his normal human strength while in ant form. This allows him to pull of all sorts of crazy things, like all the fun stuff we saw in that leaked test footage reel back in 2012.

 

For the longest time, the upper limit of ants’ strength was often capped at around 50 times their own weight; however, recent research shows that we may have been off.

 

By a couple of zeroes, to be precise.

 

Scientists at Ohio State University grabbed a few common American field ants, stared at them for a bit, and then pulled them apart for studying - undoubtedly the idea of an angry researcher who’d had his toe bitten one too many times - subsequently determining that the little critters could lift weights up to 5,000 times their own. This is something that ants can pull off because...

 

 

2. Their tiny size is a big advantage.

 

 

In the real world, ants are ridiculously strong for their size because they don’t weigh much, meaning their muscles and exoskeletons don’t need to provide a ton of support in their tiny bodies.  

 

Of course, if ants were human-sized, well… Apart from the fact that we’d all probably be scared witless and running around like headless chickens, the increase in muscle strength would not match their increase in weight, meaning they wouldn’t be able to lift as much as they could when they’re, er, ant-sized. (Human-sized ants could still tear us apart limb from limb, though.)

 

In Ant-Man’s case, this gives him a ton of superhero bonuses, too - apart from the obvious boons to infiltration and escaping that being small provides, Ant-Man also has the useful (and ridiculously fun) ability to just waltz into a room unnoticed, walk straight up to some poor shmuck, and announce his appearance a split-second later with a surprise left hook to the chin.

 

Now, you might be thinking that getting around might be troublesome for a tiny-sized hero who associates with creepy crawlies. You’d be wrong about that, though, because...

 

3. Ants can fly.

 

On its own, the power to fly isn’t exactly a big deal, mainly because more than half of the superhero population can do it. However, it becomes three times as awesome when it involves a kickass mode of transportation. Batman has his Bat-Plane made out of money and orphan tears, Thor - who can already fly via Mjolnir anyway, but probably just enjoys being a blonde showboat - has his chariot and goats (Toothgrinder and Toothgnasher, which can totally be the name of a metal rock band), and Ant-Man has… you guessed it, winged ants.

 

 

Now, when seven out of the first ten Google results for “winged ants” involves killing the little horrors, you just *know* there’s a problem in there somewhere. Sometimes mistaken for termites, winged ants usually emerge when queen ants start going up and about to find mates.

 

 

Think about that for a minute. This means that every single time Ant-Man summons a winged ant to, I don’t know, try to keep up with a brisk-walking Quicksilver or convince Hawkeye to stop making him hitch a ride on his arrow—like this, I mean; get your mind out of the gutter! - he’s actually preventing a male ant from, ah, fulfilling his responsibilities to his colony. (Suddenly, it’s not so surprising why everyone seems to hate Ant-Man, no matter who’s under the helmet.)

 

4. Ants can communicate with each other, for a variety of purposes.

 

In case you were wondering exactly how Ant-Man mastered the art of, uh, “erection deflection” for ants, well, you can blame his helmet for that. Aside from looking exactly like how an adorable trinket from the Silver Age would look like, Ant-Man’s cybernetic helmet allows him to telepathically communicate with insects. He can also amplify his voice while in microscopic size, allowing human beings to hear him (and giving him the opportunity to make his opponents hear voices in their heads and completely mess with their sanity).

 

 

Ants, on the other hand, communicate with chemicals called "pheromones." Ever wonder how ants manage to fall in line again and again, no matter how many times you interfere with or break their formation? Think of pheromones as bread crumbs that ants leave behind to point the way to food (or to get their companions to follow them).

 

Interestingly, ants also use pheromones to distinguish one another - from the type of pheromone they release, their little ant buddies would know their social ranking (this means their role in the colony, not the number of friends they have on Antbook), as well as which nest any of them came from. Still, evidence suggests that ants - or at least, larvae and pupae - communicate using sound as well.

 

Truth be told, there’s still a lot of things we don’t fully understand about ants. That’s probably why...

 

5. Ants are often underestimated (and use this against their oppressors).

 

Did you know that ants have been around for just about as long as Tyrannosaurus rex—which means they actually survived massive planetary “house cleaning” (and probably multiple times, too)? Or that ants have developed a sophisticated system of information exchange that could put even Google to shame?

 

How about this: Ants have a remarkable pathfinding and navigation system that surpasses our own. Ants take advantage of numerous environmental factors such as the position of the sun, the gradient of odors, polarized light patterns, visual panoramas, the  direction of the wind, the slope and texture of the ground, the number of steps they’ve taken… Heck, they can even backtrack when they’re lost, which is pretty darned impressive, considering how much we don’t fully comprehend about the complex mental processes of these tiny creatures.

 

Still not impressed? Behold, a frigging daisy chain of ants, tugging at an absolutely delicious piece of, uh, dead millipede. You certainly wouldn’t expect to see this level of unity and physical coordination outside of a UAAP cheerdance competition, much less in a community of tiny insects.

 

And if you have a problem with all of that, tell it to the 10,000,000,000,000,000 ants that are crawling under the ground, on walls, or into cookie jars all over the world right at this very moment.

 

But hey. If things still don’t turn out well for poor Lang, there are a ton of other career options for him, right?

 

 

— TJD, GMA News