A flea is able to jump about 0.5m. It has been said that if a flea were as big as a human, it would be able to jump over a 100-story building! When an animal jumps, it converts work done in contracting muscles into gravitational potential energy (with some steps in between). The maximum force exerted by a muscle is proportional to its cross-sectional area, and the work done by the muscle is this force times the length of contraction. If we magnified a flea by a factor of 1000, the cross section of its muscle would increase by 10002 and the length of contraction would increase by 1000. How high would this
Explanation / Answer
If you increased a flea's height by 1000, its leg structural strength would go up by the cross sectional area 1000^2 = 106 times but its mass would be proportional to the cube 1000^3 = 109 so it would be 103 times heavier in proportion to it's structural strength and break its legs when it tried to jump.