The strongest animal in the World is the one that can carry the most weight.  It’s an insect and a special sort of insect, a beetle.

 

This is a Rhinoceros beetle and it uses its massive horns to fight with other males to secure dominance and attract female beetles. They will also use their horns to dig their way to safety, under small rocks and logs during the day. It has been shown that an adult Rhinoceros beetle can carry 850 times its own weight on its back.  There are several different species of Rhinoceros beetles, all live in South America and they all have similar lifting capabilities.

When the ‘Living Wild in South America’ expedition reached Peru we stayed at the Villa Carmen Biological research station close to the Amazon basin. In the evenings we saw a number of these 100 mm insects careering through the forest. Like little helicopters, they manoeuvred through the dense trees and occasionally fell to the ground near a light.  We picked this one up and spent an hour or so photographing it. Even having the beetle in our possession it was not easy to take a good wildlife photograph of it.  There will be a whole new blog dedicated to this!

Beetles like this are common in South America and were one of the wildlife highlights we wanted to see. We wanted to see the strongest animal in the World.

 

This mahout rides on the back of his elephant in Madyha Pradesh, India. This Indian Elephant couldn’t carry much more weight than this, in fact only 25% of its own weight, a puny amount compared to a Rhinoceros beetle.