The copepod is just a single millimeter long. But for it's size, it's the strongest, fastest animal alive. The ability to escape or resist predators is a major evolutionary advantage:
Together with researchers from DTU Aqua and DTU Physics and with the aid of high-speed video recordings, Thomas Kiørboe has been able to give a detailed picture of the copepods’ escape jump. The powerful jump has made an incredible impression upon the researchers.
“They jump at a rate of half a metre per second, and that’s within a few thousandths of a second,” says Thomas Kiørboe, continuing: “It shows that copepods - in relation to their size - are more than 10 times as strong as has been previously documented for any other animal or even man-made motors...”
Link via io9 | Photo: NOAA
Previously: Marine Biologists Filmed Copepod Going to the Bathroom
(note that I used "it's" in its correct context)
But those "for it's size"-comparisons don't really mean anything. It implies a scalability that isn't there. Saying "an ant could lift XYZ if it were human size" is wrong. It couldn't lift it's own body-weight, because insect muscles are not as efficient as mammal muscles and weight increases by a dramatically faster rate than size.
Sames goes for speed. Who ever thought, defining speed by travelling multiples of one's own body-length (which is often done in articles like that, but not here to be fair) is some sort of "objective" standard? That way a human would have a much faster "objective speed" than a train.