--- title: Tiny champions: the strongest beetle, the highest-jumping flea and the leggiest millipede — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Tiny champions: the strongest beetle, the highest-jumping flea and the leggiest millipede», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: The record breakers of the animal world for their size are not lions or elephant --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / Tiny champions: the strongest beetle,… # Tiny champions: the strongest beetle, the highest-jumping flea and the leggiest millipede Lesson 365 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/0/) — The record breakers of the animal world for their size are not lions or elephants but beetles, fleas, bugs and mites, because being small changes the rules. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/1/) — Watch an ant drag a crumb bigger than itself: a muscle's strength depends on how thick it is, but weight depends on the whole body, so when an animal shrinks its weight falls much faster than its strength. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/2/) — That is why a beetle can pull a thousand times its weight while an elephant can only just carry a few people, and why a giant ant from a film would collapse under its own weight. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/4/) — A horned dung beetle was measured pulling about 1,141 times its own weight; males push and pull each other in narrow tunnels, and for a person it would be like pulling about six full double-decker buses. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/5/) — People often say rhinoceros beetles lift hundreds of times their weight; careful tests found less, but still many times their weight, and they use their horns to wrestle rivals off branches. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/6/) — A beetle's skeleton is on the outside, like light armour, with its muscles fixed inside it. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/7/) — Small animals are strong for their size because muscle strength grows with how thick a muscle is, but weight grows with the whole body; some ants can hold about 50 times their weight or more. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/8/) — A cat flea can jump about 30 centimetres, many times its body length, by storing energy in a rubbery pad and letting it go all at once like a catapult. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/9/) — An adult froghopper can leap about 70 centimetres up and may be the best high jumper of all for its size; its young hide in froth they blow from their own sticky liquid, which is not spit. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/10/) — Millipede means thousand feet, but most have fewer than 400 legs; in 2020 scientists found one in a deep drill hole in Australia with 1,306 legs, the first known with more than a thousand. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/11/) — Millipedes have two pairs of legs on most body sections and centipedes have one pair, which is how you tell them apart. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/12/) — Centipedes always have an odd number of pairs of legs, from 15 to over 190, so none has exactly 100 legs, and their front legs are fangs, so never pick up a big one. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/13/) — A tiger beetle in Australia runs about 2.5 metres a second, so fast its eyes cannot keep up, and it stops for a moment to look again. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/14/) — A tiny mite in California covers about 300 body lengths a second, more than any other animal measured. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/16/) — Fairyflies are tiny wasps, some smaller than a fifth of a millimetre, smaller than some creatures made of just one cell; they lay eggs inside other insects' eggs. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/365-tiny-champions-the-strongest-beetle-the-highest-jumping-flea-and-the-leggiest-millipede/17/) — Fairyflies have feathery wings of a stalk and long hairs and row through the air almost as if it were syrup. - ← previous: [The body's rough side: burps, farts, snot, sneezes, hiccups and poo](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/364-the-body-s-rough-side-burps-farts-snot-sneezes-hiccups-and-poo/) - next →: [Odd-looking animals: shoebills, star-nosed moles, saigas, pangolins and hagfish](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/366-odd-looking-animals-shoebills-star-nosed-moles-saigas-pangolins-and-hagfish/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)