What Is the Strongest Insect in the World?

A beetle roughly the size of a grain of rice can pull more than a thousand times its own body weight. That’s not exaggeration for effect — it’s a measured result, and it makes the horned dung beetle, scientific name Onthophagus taurus, the strongest insect ever recorded relative to its size.

Meet the Champion

The horned dung beetle can pull an estimated 1,141 times its own body weight, a figure confirmed through direct testing by researchers at Queen Mary, University of London and the University of Western Australia, according to ScienceDaily. Scaled up to human proportions, that would be roughly equivalent to a 150-pound person hauling six fully loaded double-decker buses at once, according to Live Science.

To measure that strength, researchers attached a fine cotton thread to the rear of each beetle and let it walk into a small tunnel, where the thread gave gentle resistance that mimicked the bracing motion beetles use when fighting rivals underground, according to Live Science. The beetles pulled against increasing resistance until they reached their limit, giving scientists a precise measurement of maximum pulling force relative to body weight.

Why Would a Tiny Beetle Need to Be This Strong?

The strength isn’t for digging or foraging — it’s almost entirely about competing for mates. Male horned dung beetles fight for access to females by battling rivals inside narrow tunnels dug beneath piles of dung, where females lay their eggs, according to Biology Insights. A male has to be strong enough to physically push a competitor backward out of the tunnel, so evolution appears to have favored beetles with increasingly powerful legs and a robust thorax capable of generating enormous force in a very small package.

Diet matters too. Researchers found that even the strongest beetles became far weaker after a few days on a poor diet, showing that this raw pulling power depends heavily on nutrition, much like an athlete’s strength depends on training and food intake, according to ScienceDaily.

How Does It Compare to Other Strong Insects?

The horned dung beetle isn’t the only insect with a reputation for strength, but it comfortably outperforms its closest rivals:

• Hercules beetle — can lift around 850 times its own body weight, according to Biology Insights
• Leafcutter ants — can carry leaf fragments up to 50 times their own body weight using only their jaws, according to Biology Insights

While the dung beetle wins among insects, one arachnid edges it out: a tiny mite called Archegozetes longisetosus has been measured pulling slightly more relative to its body weight, but as an arachnid rather than an insect, it doesn’t take the insect title, according to Science.

The Physics Behind Insect Strength

Insect muscles attach directly to the exoskeleton rather than to an internal skeleton the way vertebrate muscles do, and that arrangement allows for an unusually favorable ratio of muscle force to body mass at small scales. As an object shrinks, its strength — which depends on muscle cross-section — decreases more slowly than its weight, which depends on volume. That’s a big part of why small creatures across the animal kingdom can often lift or pull many times their own body weight, something that would be physically impossible for a larger animal built the same way.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the dung beetle really the strongest animal in the world? Relative to body weight, it’s the strongest known insect, but a mite species has been measured pulling a slightly higher multiple of its own body weight, making that mite the strongest animal overall by this measure, even though it isn’t an insect.

Why do dung beetles need to be so strong if they mostly eat waste? Their strength isn’t used for feeding. It evolved primarily to help males win physical contests with rival males over access to tunnels where females lay their eggs.

Pound for pound, the horned dung beetle remains one of the animal kingdom’s most extreme examples of strength — a reminder that raw power doesn’t always come from size.