Talk:Hercules beetle/Archive 1

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this is species not genus --John-Nash 16:51, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC) Hey in Japan isn't Hercules Beetle fihgting popular? It was on an episode of Samurai Champloo.

850 times???
I'm guessing it is a made up figure since I think common sense tells us that a beetle is not capable of moving a 53 pound object... I knew they were strong, but that's a bit crazy, and the lack of citation seems to support that notion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.228.201.107 (talk) 20:22, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I somewhat agree, I think in theory they could but not really in practice. I'd be surprised if they could pull even half of that. 68.161.202.67 (talk) 10:37, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

The 800-850 times it's weight claim is made in a variety of places. Here's another one from the Discovery Channel. If you boil down the math, that does equal about 53 pounds. I'm honestly not surprised. In school I watched an experiment where a Goliath effortlessly knocked a 16-lb bowling ball off a wooden track to get at the food on the other side. If you look on YouTube, you can see lots of insect battles involving Goliaths, including one where it picks up a small lobster that's many times its own weight and shakes it like a ragdoll above its head. If you examine their physiology, they're built precisely like a grapple skidder; those horns are built for moving heavy stuff out of the way so the beetle can dig for food or hide itself, since it lives entirely on the rainforest floor (which is 1-3 feet deep in decomposing sticks, dead animals, etc). Also, you have to remember that in the animal world, power does not scale up well. What is tremendously powerful on an insect scale is physically impossible (for a number of reasons) on a large scale. Otherwise the bugs would have evolved into the dominant force on earth and there would have never been any mammals. Srsly, look it up. Bullzeye contribs 19:18, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Anyway, the reference : http://rhinobeetle.net does not work and has to be removed.Jacqueshb (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 16:36, 28 November 2010 (UTC).

This does seem hard to believe. The citation trail seems to point back to a 1992 edition of the Guinness book of records - but the record isn't on their website, and I don't have the book handy to check. This article describes an attempt to test that, but the paper it refers to reveals that the test was done on another species of the Dynastinae. The author of the paper describes the '850 times' claim as 'anecdotal reports', and cites the Guinness book of records for it. Every other source I've come across looks like they're just repeating the claim uncritically. Thomas Kluyver (talk) 12:12, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

I have removed the claim. I could have instead edited it to make some sense, but in the first place the source is not academically significant. Secondly the beetle is by no means the strongest creature on Earth; blue whales are a lot stronger and so are even small elephants and goats, even if one assumes that the beetle really can lift some 25 kg or so, which it certainly cannot. At the very least the claim is meaningless without any reference to scale. And that is assuming that the claim is accurate, which as some of the remarks here clearly demonstrate, is ridiculous. In fact, if we were to scale up such a beetle to the weight of a man, say 70 kg, it probably couldn't even crawl, let alone raise itself on its legs. Consider the maths if you don't believe me; strength increases with the square of the dimensions, but mass with the cube. I suspect that some clever little twerp borrowed that figure from some much smaller insect, such as a flea, and applied it to the beetle unthinkingly. There is no reason we should make fools of ourselves falling into his own stupid trap. JonRichfield (talk) 06:07, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

This thing needs some more work, it now claims the beetle can lift 80 times it's weight, but still claims that that's equivalent to a 175 lb human lifting a 75 ton truck (which goes back to the 850 times figure) and links to the possibly erroneous source listing that different claim. The comparison needs changed to being able to lift a 7 ton truck (more like a medium sized box truck than an off-road dump truck) to be consistent and the source probably needs removed / replaced by one that substantiates the new claim. Nakamura2828 (talk) 18:52, 2 April 2015 (UTC)