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This is (fortunately) why there’s a maximum size on insects. The environment is less oxygen rich today than in the eras of giant insects in the past. They reach a size where oxygen can’t penetrate deeply enough onto their bodies.
It’s all based on a very fundamental mathematical law: if you increase the size of something, the volume increases with the third power while the surface area increases with the second power. An insect twice as large would be 8x as heavy and need 8x as much oxygen but 4x as much surface area.
That’s also the reason why insects are as strong as they are. The strength of a muscle scales primarily with the cross section area of it, which again scales with the second power. So if you’d increase the weight of an ant by a factor 10,000,000 (e.g. 5mg to 50kg), the expected strength would increase by 10,000,000^(2/3) ≈ 46,400. If it could lift 10x it’s weight at the original size, it could now only lift about 4.6% of it’s weight
Reminds me of how the damage to roads scales with the weight of the vehicle to the 4th power, so someone driving a 6000lb pickup does 16x more damage to roads than a 3000lb sedan
How does double the mass increase the damage 16 fold? I understand surface area vs volume, but that doesn’t seem relevant when working with mass
It’s more about a minimum of weight or pressure that affects it. So the higher the pressure the more likely it is to flex the road where a small vehicle with light pressure might not make it flex at all. The heavier it is the more the weight will flex the subsurface and cause more damage.
“To give you an example of that impact, let’s do a quick calculation. Here in New Zealand, the heaviest vehicle allowed on (some of) our roads is the 50MAX truck. It has nine axles and a total weight of 50 tonnes, so the load-per-axle is 5.55 tonnes. The best-selling car in NZ in 2022 was the Mitsubishi Outlander. It weighs 1.76 tonnes, so its load-per axle is 0.88 tonnes. The fourth-power law says that to calculate the relative stress that these two vehicles apply to a road, you take the ratio of their loads-per-axle and raise the result to the fourth power. In this case, (5.55 / 0.88)4 = 1582. In practical terms, it means that a 50MAX truck applies as much stress to a road as 1,582 cars (or quite literally billions of bicycles)”
Square Cube Law
On lungless insects. If they develop to be larger they will get lungs!
As long as they mutate it
As lung* as they mutate it.
maybe once I have money for hobbies, but I really want to make oxygen rich terrariums, and selectively breed tarantulas to see if I can make them larger.
As long as you leave the centipedes out of it
This is giving Island of Dr. Moreau
No!
Keep in mind it will be inherently escape proof.
if I manage to make meter wide spiders, they would suffocate as soon as they leave the enclosure.
although If they get big enough, I could have oxygen breathers I could attach to their tracheas.
try escaping my giant semi mechanised murder wasps
And a separate tank for Scorpions to fight them, we’ll make a killing
Then a youtube channel to praise the crowd
Yeah giant insects would be utterly terrifying (and deadly).
Wait until this person hears about fish.
We should all aspire to be more like bees.
am i the only one who notices that this logic makes no sense? it doesnt matter that they have no lungs, they still are susceptible to both heat and airborn toxins, they perform gas exchange. They lived because the heat and smoke were below lethal toxic levels for them.
this is true,
but the main takeaway is that some people learned that not all animals have or need lungs.
as a kid I assumed insect anatomy was like human but insect shaped, learning how alien they are for the first time is a fascinating experience I wish I could relive.
they are indeed very alien it’s true. And i suppose, i just dont really want people thinking bees are immune to smoke or other airborne toxin.
Another fun fact is that bee flight muscles are directly saturated with oxygen and have a power density comparable to helicopters. The whole bee in flight is comparable to a car. Crazy creatures.
It’s what limits their size. If insects had lungs, they could get larger. 300 million years ago, when the oxygen content in the atmosphere was temporarily higher, there were huge dragonflies with 75 cm wingspan (2.5 ft).
In the original Jurassic Park novel by Michael Crichton, one of the animals they’ve cloned are these giant dragonflies. Its only one line in the book (Tim, one if the kids, sees one fly by and recalls reading about them) but it caught my attention as just straight impossible. I remember thinking, “Unless you’re somehow controlling the oxygen level of the air around this entire island, there’s no way that bug can’t breathe.”
they don’t have circulatory systems either they’ve basically just pushing things through themselves and tryna make it work
Pedant here. They absolutely do have circulatory systems. They have what’s known as an open circulatory system, whereas we have a closed circulatory system.
Huh, the Greek hero Spiracles saved the bees
Obviously, the Greek hero Spiracles also rhymes with the bees
TIL
Why doesn’t the damaging and hot particulate matter in smoke do any harm to or otherwise clog up their spiracles like it does to the inner lining of lungs? I gather lungs are wet and also very delicate, but if they’re directly oxygenating their organs through these spiracles eventually it must get to somewhere wet and delicate for the smoke to get in and potentially harm.
Maybe something like:
- The spiracles stop working and the insect stops most major movements
- When the air becomes better, the new air fills the spiracles and reinvigorates the insect
vs
- Humans need to use their muscles to start breathing, or they will require external assistance
Hunh. TIL.
Not just bees, it’s true of all insects.
Consequently, the amount of oxygen in the air determines how big bugs can grow. Get too big, and the oxygen can’t diffuse into the body fast enough. This even shows up in the fossil records, with larger bugs being found alongside evidence of eras that had more oxygen in the atmosphere.
They aren’t insects, but most arachnids have book lungs, which are basically a pocket full of air gills.
How much was the oxygen and where has it gone since then?
Currently oxygen is about 20% of the atmosphere. In the Carboniferous period, 60 million years ago, it’s thought to have gotten as high as 30%.
Oxygen is highly reactive, and the O2 configuration is not particularly stable, so over time it gets locked up in other molecules, which are then burred or deposited at the bottom of bodies of water.
Oxygen has always been plentiful on earth, but for most of geologic history it was bound up in solid molecules in the crust. Nearly 2.5 billion years ago, bacteria began “unlocking” gaseous O2 as a byproduct of the nitrogen based chemical reaction they lived on.
I remember the first time I heard bugs dont have lungs. Like wtf? Just no internal ventilation pumping air as needed. Seems wierd but also thx God. They are annoying enough.
They also have no blood or blood vessels, just a little heart and blood-like stuff splashing around.
I didn’t know that either wow. Really freaking and interesting
Bugs are fucking weird.
So if I understand you correctly, if I remove my lungs, I’m a bee? My aunt had lung cancer, so they’ll probably kill me, anyway. I’ll report back on the results.
left wiggle, right wiggle, left wiggle, buzz
WHAT! MY MOTHER WAS A SAINT!
Yeah, and if you pluck a chicken, it will be a human, because it’s featherless and stands on two legs.
But what came first, the human or the egg?
I don’t have a clever response, so I’ll just point out that eggs predate vertebrates by millions of years.
Diogenes my goat
Glad you brought this up. I’m doing some work in this rich guy’s house and I can’t find a single spittoon.
Nah-ah, that makes it a dinosaur!
Wait till you hear about Eric the half a bee
I do love me some Monty Python. I can never pick a favorite sketch. It keeps changing. The Parot sketch is definitely top ten.
If you like reading, maybe a half-way solution could be achieved with book lungs like a spider.
Non-insect arthropods FTW!
That is almost how it works, but to really become a bee you’ll have to turn the lungs into wings. Good luck. I’m looking forward to seeing the result.
[Lung flapping sounds]
Mm moist.
It would definitely change the nature of romance and sex.
No because you’re likely too big (no offense) :(
I think insects have little holes all over their bodies, in which air gets inside by itself through some physics shenanigans. It doesn’t need to be actively sucked in like with lungs, it just happens because they’re so small.
This method doesn’t scale up though since if you’re bigger, you need more air, and having little holes all over your body won’t cut it. Thats when you know you need lungs, and that’s why you don’t see insects the size of a dog these days (thankfully).
There used to be times in the Earth’s history (Carboniferous) where the air’s composition was different though, and since it had more oxygen in it, insects could grow a lot larger.
Adding to this, the holes (spiracles) connect to the tracheae, which connect to air sacs. While respiration is almost entirely passive in smaller species, larger species actually force air through the system to aid the otherwise passive process.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_system_of_insects
Side note: Spiders have book lungs. They’re not insects, but like insects, they are arthropods.
Fun fact: Cutaneous respiration (aka “Skin breathing”) is something we humans do too. But it accounts only for 1% to 2% of our oxygen input.
However, the cornea of our eyes doesn’t have its own blood vessels to supply it. Therefore, it relies on direct gas exchange with the environment—in other words, skin respiration.
Our eyes breath like bees.
Is that why bees can’t wear contact lenses?
No, it’s because they have compound eyes. Even if they could afford all the different lenses they need, they’d never have enough time to put them in and take them out, while still working a full day.
surely they could just make one big lens with facets in it? sure they’re gonna be hellishly expensive but at least they’re usable
Honestly, I was already out of my depth with the entomology and ophthalmology discussed here. The economics of bee optometry might be a bridge too far for me. Can a bee make enough honey to afford such lenses? If so, does it improve the bee’s ability to make honey enough to justify the cost? I have no idea and no clue regarding how to investigate this issue.
perhaps we’re coming at this from the wrong direction, does a bee even need lenses? maybe what they actually need is just eye protection, which would make everything much cheaper
I like this fact. That’s why it’s so important to take out certain kinds of contacts at night.
So what you’re saying is I have two eyes in my beeholes?
1-2% is more than I’d have imagined!
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it but the movie Mimic had bugs that had grown to the size of a human and taken on a vaguely human form in order to hunt us.
The movie used the reasoning that the bugs had developed basic lungs which enabled them to grow past the limits of their usual breathing apparatus.
No point to make here, I just remember it being cool that they put a small amount of thought into why the bugs could grow to human proportions.
Kafka’s Gregor would like a word.
So theoretically if we terraformed the Earth we would be free to genetically engineer humans to survive without lungs?
They wouldn’t be human. So much of us is built around our lungs, including our ability to speak that anything adapted to survive without them would be as different from a human as a human is from other lung-less animals. Even if they were more intelligent, they would not look or act remotely like a human.
Keyword suggestion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism
Okay, first of all, how dare you bring evidence and reason into this.
On a more serious note, I agree with the position mentioned in the second paragraph that transhumanism results in a posthuman being, that is, a species that is not human.
Human is such a flaky word, and species isn’t much better. I’d bet there could be a situation in which they can successfully interbreed with relatively modern humans and still produce viable offspring, so still the same species. Human doesn’t even require homo sapiens though. It can include other species that have the traits of humans.
You’re not wrong. One group will displace the other, though. Some of us Homo Sapiens still have genes from Homo Neanderthalensis. Neanderthals aren’t around anymore, though. Also, archeological evidence suggests they didn’t spend much time together.
Then, when your spouse hugs you, they’ll have beauty in their eye.
Bee holder
My Aunt Bee had lung cancer
“I’ve been trying to quit smoking. I want to take better care of my spiracles”
Insects don’t have lungs. It also means their potential size is directly limited by the oxygen content in the air.
Which is why we don’t see cat sized insects roaming around.
Related is this awesome video discussing dinosaur breathing
that was great! thanks!
Which is why you don’t see cat sized insects roaming around, I live next to a tarantula trail and some of them fuckers get BIG.
tarantulas do indeed have lungs though
Wait… tarantula trails are a thing?
Yeah they followed paths, I think it’s a way of avoiding dangerous terrain. They are rather fragile beasts.
Arachnids are not insects though.
Spiders aren’t insects. Though like them, they don’t have lungs! Not ones like ours, anyway.
In my defense I am a smartass not smart.
Eh, you were close enough.
Beekeepers intentionally use smoke to make bees docile during collection time, transfers, etc
However, what I’ve heard from a beekeeper is that the smoke triggers a flight response in them (from fire) so they consume honey ready to flee, and that’s actual what makes them docile/drowsy.
You’re telling me the bees get the munchies when they smoke…
Pretty shitty instinct if it means they end up sleeping instead of fleeing.
I think if it comes to it they just flee, drowsily, with full bellies of honey - so they’ve got energy to fly and something left over to start the new hive.
And, for the most part, humans’ lungs don’t have bees!
I somehow forgot about bees not having lungs. I knew some other small things didn’t.
Speak for yourself
I find that hard to beelieve
I’m skeptical too, but that’s the buzz.
What’s that? Human lungs don’t have bees?!
A large influx of bees ought to put a stop to that!
Most invertebrates have no internal air sac breathing organ. Arachnids kinda do, and I’m seeing something about semi-aquatic snails, but direct diffusion is pretty efficient at that scale.
Axolotls have them despite not needing them because they can live just fine without ever inhaling air for their entire life. But they sometimes do it for fun and then blow out bubbles.
Amphibians are the weirdest vertebrates.
Looking at my axolotl that is currently trying to pretend to be a plant, yep.
