How much can a goliath beetle lift?

Answer 1

No. It is much too small, and while it can easily lift several times its own body weight, like maybe a banana, it is still much too small and fragile to hold up against a ton of weight.

Hercules beetles are prodigiously strong for their size but they are nowhere near large enough to be able to lift a ton (1,016 kg). They can lift around 850 times their own weight however, and that would mean that an 85g adult beetle could lift 72kg (160lb) which is about the same as a human being's weight.

To lift a ton, a Hercules beetle would have to weigh in at about 1.2kg and therein lies the problem, at that size, the beetle would lose a lot of the advantages of scale that small creatures have when exerting their muscle power. Strength, increases as the square of the size, but weight increases by the cube. This is why large animals (e.g. elephants) have to have big thick legs to support their weight, but smaller critters (e.g. ants) can make do with much spindlier limbs. So, it's no surprise that the strongest animal, for it's size, is an insect - albeit a big one!

The strongest living thing is actually a bacteria. The bacilli that cause the STD gonorrhea, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, are able to extend and attach a pilus or hair-like filament to a surface and drag themselves along by it. They are capable of pulling 100,000 times their own weight! If it were possible to scale this feat of strength up to our world then it would mean that a human being would be capable of dragging something weighing 7,500 tons. Unfortunately, it is not!