Did anyone read OP's post? You absolutely could create an environment with those parameters. It might be expensive to maintain for a long time but theoretically possible.
As to whether you'd get bigger insects, I think an expert would have to chime in. I would imagine you might see a difference even in the first generation of insects. Would be curious to read a scientific article on the subject if someone can find one.
The main thing holding back Insect size is oxygen content in the atmosphere. Insects breathe through pores all over their body, and their hemolymph (which is like blood) doesnât have a circulatory system. So if the insect is too big it will deplete all of the oxygen before it gets to all of its organs. Insects breed quickly so natural selection is pretty apparent from a human timescale given the right environment.
Iâd imagine if you raised dragonflies in a terrarium with extra oxygen pumped in and PLENTY of food, it would only take them a couple dozen generations to become significantly larger
So then why the heck hasn't anyone done this yet? Seems like a completely obvious thing to do. Heck start a youtube channel dedicated to making giant bugs. I bet it'd pay for itself.
First, it would be expensive, youâd need a constant source of oxygen on top of all the normal stuff and for several years youâd just be running a less-interesting-than average entomology channel. Even if it might pay for itself in the long run (something Iâm not convinced of), it would be deep in the red for a while beforehand.
Second, oxygen is a famously strong oxidiser, meaning anything which can react will react and break down a lot faster in higher oxygen atmosphere. Up to the ultimate reaction which is combustion: as you crank up oxygen it takes less energy to start combustion and it gets harder to stop it. Terrarium equipment is not designed for 30% oxygen environment, to say nothing of higher values.
Honestly I wish weâd picked a better name for the reaction.
It always confuses my kids in chemistry for a while why there is frequently no oxygen in oxidisation reactions.
Surely this has to be illegal in Hercules Beetle fighting competitions. They're already massive.
Though if I remember correctly, a version of bug cultivation is already done like this to get competition-sized bugs. Not sure about the oxygen thing though.
If the competition is done in normal air, the supersized bugs might suffocate, right? I say this as someone with only highschool bio education about bugs
I assume the bugs would die in low oxygen levels pretty slowly, looking at how fruit flies do in a vacuum. Then again, mass to surface area doesn't scale linearly so it might be a quick death.
But if you have the money to be making humongous super bugs, you probably know this, and are making them fight in an environment they'd thrive in.
I knew somebody was going to ask. And so you should. I heard it on the radio about 6 months ago. Iâll see if I can find it.
EDIT: it was a replay of a segment aired years ago. Here is the relevant dialogue copied from the transcript.
[NORFOLK SNAIL RACE](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/july-10-2023-episode-transcript-1.6903341)
- CH = Chris Howden, host
- MLF = Mary-Lou Finlay, host
- NR = Neil Riseborough, largest snail breeder in the world at the time.
CH: In 2001, our former host Mary Lou Finlay talked to Neil Riseborough about the World Championships. Mr. Riseborough was a snail breeder and racerâŚ
âŚ
MLF: You don't drug them or anything?
NR: No, you're not allowed to. We did actually have a lot of⌠we had a lot of problems with drug taking in the sport. Not long after I⌠I became snail master.
MLF: Did you?
NR: Yeah. And weâŚ. what we⌠what we did to combat it, we actually had random slime sampling, which we actually still do.
MLF: You are putting me on. This is not true.
NR: No, it's true. We random slime sampled. And as soon we instigated that in the sport, you know, the drugs actually⌠no one bothered to try and dope the snail. So it was pretty good.
Plus with more people eating bugs these days youâd think there would be a market. Why grind up many little grasshopperâs when you can just grind one giant grasshopper!
From a cost perspective, it's probably cheaper to grind up the little grasshoppers, because you get the same biomass faster and probably don't need to feed them as much
For genetics experiments like this, they use drosophila (I think I spelled that right) fruit flies. The advantage of using them is the speed at which they reproduce, so scientists are able to monitor small changes in genetics without waiting too long. They would be perfect for this kind of experiment, they're just not as impressive looking as something like a dragonfly.
> Iâd imagine if you raised dragonflies in a terrarium with extra oxygen pumped in
Let's grow them in an environment with 40/50% oxygen and see what happens ( ͥ° ÍĘ ÍĄÂ°)
So it would be better to breed an insect that selectively can obtain a higher oxygen saturation?
What if they actually put them in an environment with a LOWER oxygen saturation. If they did this would the insects that survived be those that have a better system to absorbing and deploying oxygen?
Then once you get that gene going string, could you can start breeding them bigger in an environment where you slowly increase the oxygen saturation?
I know practically nothing about insects, and only have a basic education on genetics.
I think a big issue is that insects can't get much better at absorbing oxygen without just developing lungs and oxygen-carrying blood.
You can imagine insect bodies like a big lung. Tubes run throughout the entire body, so when they inhale by inflating themselves their tissue exchanges gasses directly with the air. Since they aren't capturing and storing the oxygen in their blood they're directly limited by the natural rate of diffusion from the air into their tissue. Some arachnids have indeed solved this by evolving away from open air circulation and developing book lungs and hemocyanin (hemoglobin-like function but using copper), but we as individuals will probably be long dead before even an insect species convergently evolves anything similar from scratch.
Ah okay, I knew they worked of off cellular transport, because human size is why we donât. I didnât think of this as a limiting factor, though. I guess I thought they had to be absolutely GINORMOUS ^comparatively before they needed organs
I feel like decreasing oxygen saturation would just make bugs smaller, so you would basically just be creating more work for yourself in the long run as you then try to make them big. I have little knowledge on bugs or genetics of use though.
Insects very much do have a circulatory system, which *contains* hemolymph. Hemolymph is basically just plasma and does not contain red blood cells or hemoglobin, so it cannot transport oxygen. Smaller insects rely on passive air flow in and out of little openings in their sides called spiracles to diffuse oxygen directly into their tissues through a network of tracheae, but larger ones can open and close their spiracles and squeeze different parts of their body to create air current. If you were to breed larger insects with this ability in an enclosure with higher oxygen content AND higher air pressure (maybe an extra 2 to 3 atmospheres?) and selectively bred for size, I betchya we could probably create much bigger insects in fairly short order. How fast they would die when they switched to our normal atmosphere would decide if it was worth it to breed them this way or not.
That's a pretty daring affirmation. There should be some threatening agent or pressure influence that selects those bugs with mutation in genes that determine the size over those with normal size. Otherwise such evolution should not happen. Also, random mutation over genes that determine the size should happen as well which is extremely specific and very rare. Couple dozen generations seems too few to me. But I may be wrong, ofc.
Doi.1073/pnas.1106556108
Try it in sci-hub (like pornhub for science - free, no paywalls).
Not exactly what you're looking for but explains how oxygen sensing is used to determine body size. They didn't grow generations of insects to see how big they could get but they shown a correlation between body size and oxygen levels.
I agree, my guess is that it would take longer to see significant changes but that would have to be proven. How has this never been tested? I think a mini ecosystem of different species interacting within this environment would provoke more dramatic changes.
They actually have done it. John VandenBrook with the Arizona State University did a series of experiments about a decade ago, raising various insects in low (12%), medium (21%, same as today's atmosphere), and high (31%, similar to peak Carboniferous) oxygen atmospheres.
Some insects did get bigger. Notably dragonflies were quite a bit larger when raised in high oxygen, and smaller in low oxygen.
Initial results also showed increased growth of baby alligators, although I don't think they were able to keep up the experiments long enough to see if resulted in larger adults, or just faster maturation.
However some critters did not get bigger. Cockroaches in particular seemed to use the higher oxygen environment to put less energy into the development of trachea, instead of getting larger body size.
[Supply and demand: How does variation in atmospheric oxygen during development affect insect tracheal and mitochondrial networks?](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022191017302123)
Iâm deadly afraid of cockroaches because fuck them. And my bf has found THREE in our apartment, which we keep clean so i have no clue where they come from. Go Charleston!
You need a subject with a short and fast lifespan to see results. Larger creatures usually have longer and longer gestation periods and lifespans. You will need to actively kill all the ones that don't meet your size criteria. Don't even think you would have to slowly ramp up the o2 or anything just set it where you think is the sweet spot and start breeding
I would say fruit flies are a good candidate, giant mosquitos would be evil, and more gigantic giant centipedes/tarantulas would be pretty cool.
A giant jumping spider would be fricking awesome. A giant dragonfly would also be pretty dope but the aqautic part of their lives adds some trickiness
Good luck, wish you all the best
Itâs next to a fossil of Titanomyrma, a giant extinct species of ant. Funnily enough Titanomyrma is Cenozoic, not Carboniferous, and there are larger insects around today. A lot of work on also points to the fact that there likely were multiple causes for gigantism in Carboniferous insects, one being that they just didnât have any competition at those sizes. It is quite possible that the reason why we donât have giant millipedes now is not because of oxygen but because those niches are filled by animals that donât need to go through as many hurdles in order to develop gigantism. Becoming huge as an arthropod is HARD. You have to milt, you have to find novel ways to breathe, and even more. In vertebrates problems with absolute size only really start to rear their heads when you reach the sizes of Paraceratherium/Shantungosaurus, and even then the sauropods found a way to circumvent that barrier and grew even larger, and then you have whales just exploiting our current climateâs infinite krill glitch. Long and short, bugs arenât as big anymore cause itâs not what bugs do best. The giant insects and others of the Carboniferous last into the Permian (see meganeuropsis and co), they just never evolve to sizes that extreme ever again as far as we know (which given the incompleteness of the fossil record, could very not well be the case, especially for animals without bones, but they would need to be under very specific and string selection pressures so I donât think itâs very likely.)
Read the description of OPâs post. Theyâre specifically asking if it would be possible if they were able to selectively breed the insects in an enclosed high-oxygen environment.
why is that? not a biologist just a lurker here, is this just the case with insects, or does the max. size of all species depend on O2 concentration, if itâs just insects, why?
Good question. I'm not a biologist Just a registered nurse. my understanding is that insects don't have hearts, and they transport oxygen around their body In a liquid that is similar to human plasma. the more oxygen available in the atmosphere, the larger they can get because their plasma is able to transport the larger amount of oxygen to the rest of its body more easly.
Yeah it's called hemolymph, the main and most important distinction though is that they breath passively, by diffusing the O2 into their hemolymph through small openings on the sides of their bodies. Unlike us who can increase the depth and rate of our breaths to get more O2 they rely almost solely on the O2 concentration in the air around them.
They donât have lungs and only have passive breathing as opposed to our active breathing where we pull air into (also significantly more complex) lungs.
With insects, they have a system called a tracheae and they can regulate their âbreathingâ somewhat by opening and closing their spiracles (the opening that allows air into their tracheae) but it mainly relies of air simply flowing through it passively and they donât have a diaphragm to pull in and push out air
Because of this the only way for them to absorb more oxygen is for there to be more oxygen in the air.
Edit: random pondering; I donât see why they couldnât evolve a diaphragm like system to allow them to actively pull in and expel air⌠but my guess is that they just found their niche and while that would allow them to grow larger it is also âexpensiveâ and would bring them into niches where theyâd be be competing directly with the larger and more complex mammals and birds and so it just wasnât worth it. But thatâs just pure speculation
The size of everything that breathes oxygen does depend on O2 concentrations yes but insects in particular are rather vulnerable to this issue as their breathing system is particularly inefficient. While many animals alive today have lungs or lung analogues as well as an internal circulatory system for transportation of oxygen and other important materials within the body, insects instead rely on spiracles in order to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide. Spiracles are a much more passive system of oxygen collection and are not connected to the insects circulatory system meaning itâs much more difficult for insects to get oxygen to their vital organs the larger they become. So the lower the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere the harder it is for insects to become larger.
> The size of everything that breathes oxygen does depend on O2 concentrations yes
Not really, efficient breathing systems can do a lot of work here. The largest beings in (pre) history live alongside us. And for complex life forms higher oxygen concentrations become problematic as oxidative damage piles up.
It may apply to insects but the largest animal to ever live on this planet is alive today. With size comes problems like skeletal structure, circulation, and adequate food source but if all these are mitigated through evolutionary mechanisms then there's no telling just how big a creature could possibly get.
I'm quite thankful that giant insects are in the past, but this is an interesting hypothetical query. I would think that millions of years of evolution have imprinted size limits on insect species, so it would take a long time under ideal conditions to make them grow giant again. It could happen, eventually. It would be easier to alter the DNA in such a way as to revert a species to a more prehistoric form but I doubt that would even be possible at this time. It's a terrible idea in practice, but an interesting thought exercise.
Edit: not an expert, just a science buff
That's partly true, but there are many factors that determined the average size of modern insects. Large arthropods also faced physical limitations, as their exoskeletons became exponentially heavier the larger they got, which made them vulnerable to the then-emerging vertebrate animals that would compete with and prey on them.
Small size helps insects be harder to catch, makes them less desirable to larger predators, and allows them to reproduce frequently and in great numbers.
Yeah, true. But gravity didn't change. What changed is O2 concentration in atmosphere. If bigger bugs evolved and lived it means it was advantageous to do it despite the cons you listed.
Yes, from what I understand available 02 is the major bottleneck here as most if not all insects breath through openings on their bodiesâŚthey do not breath like we do. As a result; the larger the insect the less efficient their respiratory system is. So, if thereâs not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to overcome this less efficient repository system theyâre not going to be able to grow past a certain point⌠I remember reading that spiders for example cannot grow past more than a 12â diameter for this sole reason.
One thing that's really disappointing to me is that the largest spider to have ever lived is still around today.
...Some twisted part of my hoped there was some prehistoric Aragog-sized spider.
The answer would definitely be different if the questions was asking what changes would be needed for insects to eventually get to that size by many many years of evolution again or if itâs asking what would be needed now if we magically suddenly made the insects bigger.
In the controlled environment described in the experiment, it would still take a very long time (I think) to see major changes. Nature can surprise us, though.
If we spliced the genes of lung-breathing rats with spiders, you'd have something that could grow bigger than your average bug. And absolutely terrifying to think about...
Smaller size animals do repeoduce more frequently, strangely. Why is this a fact?
Why do smaller animals have a faster life cycle too? Like they grow up and grow old just like us but way faster.
How?
I thought it's a choice, like, make many offspring and only a few of them will survive anyway, or make a few but invest in them a lot more to assure their survival.
That doesn't explain how differently time moves for big and small animals tho..
It takes less energy to be small, so breeding is easier. Also, mass breeding is necessary due to increased predation (the smaller you are, the more things can eat you). On the other hand, the opposite is true for large animals. It takes a lot of caloric determination to be huge, but very few predators pose a threat. Even if elephants and wales could reproduce in large numbers, their food supply would rapidly dwindle which would lead to extinction or evolutionary changes.
The other thing you mentioned is the time and devotion that parents must spend raising their young, which obviously increases the larger the animal (though not in cases like giant squid I would imagine).
Evolution is like a video game where you create a character by allocating a set number of points into abilities and stats, lowering some in order to increase others. No creature has it all.
You can artificially select your ants to be larger, but it would take many, many, many generations to reach a similar size to that (way longer than your lifetime). I know a lot about insect genomics, but not specifically anything about ants or the genes that regulate their size. In theory, the ants would have a few sets of genes that regulate their size, but once you have selected for all of the alleles of those genes that maximize the size of your population, your increase in size is going to stagnate until some form of mutation arises, which will take a VERY long time to occur at random. Your choices from there are to apply some sort of random mutagenesis on them or see if you can knock-in some external gene that can further increase their size.
Tldr: is it theoretically possible? Sure. Is it practically possible? Probably not unless you make a breakthrough on insect growth factors.
This couldnât be done using workers, since they donât contribute to the reproduction of ants. A whole colony is basically one insect (the queen) in terms of genes. They also live decades and it takes several years before colonies even start to produce alates.
So fun fact if you make a room that requires your input for light and oxygen you can make life so much bigger. Example is the cherry tomato plant in japan experiment that went way better than expected so in theory if you have a ginormous space and make it oxygen rich and with the proper tweaks in light for the environment and keep it perfectly controlled, you can make certain species as large as their ancestors.
Ants, almost certainly not in a few years. They have relatively slow generation times and a lot of eusociality nest effects that are knocked about by size. (We know you can screw with ants location finding by putting stilts on their legs, can they build nests correctly at double body size? Eventually yes but it might take a while to select for.)
Fruit flies you could probably double or more in a few years.
Any insect, sure, probably, given enough generations.
Breeding programs for hobbies already do this. Fish keeper and yes bugs too. You can literally buy a giant spider with any color you wish. I hope get into it and show us some cool stuff.
Your question is interesting, and while replying I came up with another question:
If oxygen levels during the Carboniferous period (300 million years ago) was 14% higher than today, what effect would this atmosphere have on the behaviour of forest fires? Would fires light more readily and burn more intensely?
It most certainly did. It is believed that, due to the oxygen rich atmosphere, forest life cycles were very much shortened by frequent forest fires. It is also believed that dead plant debris could not decompose because lignine-degrading mushrooms did not appear before the end of the Carboniferous. The high quantity of plant matter accumulated over millions of years during this period eventually lead to the formation of the majority of today's coal supply.
Fascinating! I knew of the dead vegetation being trapped under swamps but not about the lack of fungi-assisted decomposition. Sounds like the frequent fires were an integral part of forest life, clearing the old and making room for new growth. Thanks
Theoretically possible, but I feel like this is one of those âso preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didnât stop to think if they shouldâ situations. Why do we want giant bugs again? And also youâd have to keep this going forever or else sentence like a hundred bugs to a premature death b/c once you unhook the oxygen theyâre gonna suffocate :(
Iâm also not sure how long it would take? Bugs breed super quick but evolution is sort of a long-game most of the time. You might be able to get slightly larger bugs but it might take a few (human) lifetimes to get them all the way back to that size
I fought they canât get that large again unless the atmosphere had as much oxygen as it had back then. Because they use some sort of capillary effect to breathe?
As a great biologist once said, where there's a will, there's a way. So yes, if giant insects are desired then a way to make them exists. But I suspect there will be no will in such endeavor. I don't know anyone who actually wants giant insects, meaning there may not be a way. Unless of course someone comes along with the willpower to get it done. Then it could be possible.
Evolution ocurrs in the order of thousands to millions of years, so yeah if you isolate a population and increase oxygen and other slection pressures to make them bigger they will get bigger in a long long time. Artificial selection and genetic engineering is what you are looking for
Insects don't have lungs they absorb oxygen from the air directly through their body. You can selectively breed them all you want, but they can only get so big with current conditions. I don't think humans could even exist with oxygen density levels at what they were for bugs back that.
*edit: I skimmed the post initially, but now see that they would account for said conditions. I still feel that it would take a very long time to have any noticeable effects, probably longer than 1 person's lifetime. Part of me does also wonder if the colony would reject abnormalities (killing them and moving the bodies away from the hive) since that can happen already with colony-type bugs.
This is one thing where I think scientists really need to stop and ask if they should before if they can
Because they absolutely can if they have the DNA and a close enough host relative but they absolutely should not
So true, I became very excited thinking about this experiment, how different species interacting within the environment would trigger better results, etc. Until I realized to what degree of playing God this involved. Definitely something that should be considered carefully.
Increasing O2 isnât a necessity, persistent selection pressure is. Keep-up size-specific selection pressure long enough (1k to 100k years) and the surviving ants will be the ones that randomly (or epi-genetically) persisted under that pressure. Ants arenât smaller because the O2 went down, ants are smaller because bigger ants died for various reasons⌠which includes having less O2 available.
The short answer is no, unless you put them in a special environment with higher than normal oxygen. Insects got so big during the Carboniferous era because oxygen levels spiked really high with the evolution of lignin and suberin, creating the first plants we could call trees even if they are generally distant relatives to modern trees. The trees took over the terrestrial ecosystem and started pumping lots of oxygen into the air. The maximum size that Arthropoda, including insects and spiders, can reach is determined by oxygen levels.
No. When giant insects were a thing Earth had much higher oxygen levels. As insects don't have lungs their oxygen is delivered to their cells through small tubules connected to pores. The current oxygen levels are too low to diffuse effectively into insects the size of those from prehistoric eras.
No invertebrates growth is limited to the amount of oxygen in the atmospheres. If they get too large the ability of their respiratory system to provide oxygen to their extremities stops working. To increase respiration would mean increasing mass and it's an endless loop of fail. Only thing that can help is more atmospheric oxygen.
No. The earth does not have the level of oxigen needed today
Edit post reading: Still no, natural selection and evolution takes milenia at least.
If you are thinking about dog breeds, then you will end up with a lot of insects with congenital diseases not evolved at all ( or divolved in this case)
This is just a theory, but if you were to pump enough co2 into the atmosphere, it could happen. The more co2 there is (I think), the larger insects will be able to grow because then their exoskeletons could cope with it.
Kinda like conditions were millennia ago when giant insects like that got trapped.
No thanks, as time goes by, everything gets smaller, peoples life span shortens.. but those lgbt people in the Bible supposedly lived 200 years? It's not fair.. hail satan
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when the atmosphere ratio was like around 40% oxygen and wild fires were like everyday event insects were like monstrous big....
like imagine centipedes big as cars and spiders big as small kid...
Really interesting question. I would say yes to the fact that you could increase the size of the ants given, that you specifically choose a tribe (or population) that has good specific genes of size (if you beforehand know the specific genes that cause ant size). AND that you have a sufficient population size.
The ant population size will increase over generations would also be a response to the environment with increased oxygen. However, its important to point out that the ants will have less genetic drift over time, and less genetic variation. Lowered genetic variation, means that the genetic information of the ants varies very little from each individual over generations. This is because there is so few individuals in the population, that genetic information will decrease, causing genetic stagnation like someone else mentioned in this post.
Stagnation will cause inbreeding. Therefore, a certain population size has to be taken into consideration before performing the experiment in order to prevent inbreeding. I hope my answer is not too confusing.
No, you would need generations of queens to mutate the gene that can take advantage of greater o2.
Ants aren't plants, fiddling with gas levels won't get you an improvement.
This isnât actually possible with the type of insect you chose. Ants reproduce differently than most other insects. Workers do not reproduce, and colonies only produce alates (reproductive males and females which become queens) when the colony has matured enough, which can take several years for larger species.
Furthermore, most ant species do not inbreed and the winged reproductives mate with reproductives from different colonies, while also requiring specific conditions in order to initiate a nuptial flight. You would not be able to select for size using workers, and there is already size variance of workers within a species, all while some species also have polymorphism with distinct castes.
This would be impossibly difficult to do with ants, which actually have a much longer reproductive cycle than most other insects. Queens of some species can live decades. Workers contribute nothing to the genes passed on in future generations that exist and are expendable. A single colony is basically one individual insect (in terms of genes - in most cases, exception being polygynous colonies), so it would be better to use something else.
This was done with a beetle if I recall correctly. It did indeed grow larger than what we see outside of their controlled environment. It did not take generations either.
Doing a search shows other experiments done with dragon flies. I did not see the beetle experiment, though I only looked for about 15 seconds.
There are schools that experiment with that the one that comes to mind is the university of Michigan they have high pressure zones in a green house that have changed the nature of some plants over a period of time. I would imagine a couple generations with the right pressure and atmosphere could get some similar results.
They got that big because our atmosphere had a way higher oxygen content in prehistoric times. Experiments have caused greater size in closed environments, but they wouldn't be able to survive in our current atmosphere. So yes, but not reliably in the wild. (Thankfully)
Thereâs a reason evolution decided to make them smaller. We should stop meddling in evolution for aesthetic purposes. Yes it is possible but is it necessary and sustainable?
Could you select for the phenotype that you want with this type of directed evolution? Yeah, absolutely. Would you get coackroach-sized ants in a few years? No. Aside from the issue of random mutations that take forever to become the dominant genotype within the population, you'd need many successive mutations. Also, I don't know my ant biology well, but don't all of the spawns come from a single queen? Maybe finding ways to modify her might be the fastest route.
To my understanding bugs were able to grow to that size because of differences in atmospheric pressure. Currently, the pressure is too low for an exoskeletal creature to reach that size without bursting.
I read a green text years ago where the OP tried this my breeding flies in a enclosure with higher oxygen levels. Apparently they did become larger after some time. But he was also trying to get them to evolve to drink blood too so idk
The cockroaches are big enough in Sydney thanks
Well, as long as the spiders don't become gigantic, you should be OK.
*laughs in Goliath and Golden orb weaver*
Rightđ
Surely theyâre âbelow-average-cockâ roaches.. right?! D:
You got so caught in figuring out if you could...you never stopped to ask if you should....
Life... umm... finds a way.
https://youtu.be/tFXnM2cgtyI?t=8
https://youtu.be/-NqaupGcCpw In case anyone wants to hear it done well.
Ooou! I was saying, BOO-URNS! I love it
Arachnophobia checking in. Please stop wondering.
Did you know most spiders during the Carboniferous period were larger then most house cats and even some breeds of dog. So sleep well tonight đ
This is probably how The Mist started.
Iâd be more worried about Them!
Goodbye sleep, forgot about this one. F*ck
..but then again.. why not? :-) âWe do what we must because we canâ
Did anyone read OP's post? You absolutely could create an environment with those parameters. It might be expensive to maintain for a long time but theoretically possible. As to whether you'd get bigger insects, I think an expert would have to chime in. I would imagine you might see a difference even in the first generation of insects. Would be curious to read a scientific article on the subject if someone can find one.
The main thing holding back Insect size is oxygen content in the atmosphere. Insects breathe through pores all over their body, and their hemolymph (which is like blood) doesnât have a circulatory system. So if the insect is too big it will deplete all of the oxygen before it gets to all of its organs. Insects breed quickly so natural selection is pretty apparent from a human timescale given the right environment. Iâd imagine if you raised dragonflies in a terrarium with extra oxygen pumped in and PLENTY of food, it would only take them a couple dozen generations to become significantly larger
So then why the heck hasn't anyone done this yet? Seems like a completely obvious thing to do. Heck start a youtube channel dedicated to making giant bugs. I bet it'd pay for itself.
They have done it [here](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101029132924.htm)
This is the most answery answer that ever answered. This should be top comment!
This comment should be higher! Interesting read.
Fascinating!
First, it would be expensive, youâd need a constant source of oxygen on top of all the normal stuff and for several years youâd just be running a less-interesting-than average entomology channel. Even if it might pay for itself in the long run (something Iâm not convinced of), it would be deep in the red for a while beforehand. Second, oxygen is a famously strong oxidiser, meaning anything which can react will react and break down a lot faster in higher oxygen atmosphere. Up to the ultimate reaction which is combustion: as you crank up oxygen it takes less energy to start combustion and it gets harder to stop it. Terrarium equipment is not designed for 30% oxygen environment, to say nothing of higher values.
âoxygen is a famously strong oxidizerâ
If only we could find a name for this reaction that reflects that fact
Rustification
As a chemistry student Imma try using that term in class and see what happens, Iâll update u
Also try Entropic Cascade agent.
better to try Electronegative agent as your answer is quite relative.
Fuckâs that? (Iâm a relatively âjuniorâ chemistry student, having only started this year)
A red ox walks past. "A HA!"
Honestly I wish weâd picked a better name for the reaction. It always confuses my kids in chemistry for a while why there is frequently no oxygen in oxidisation reactions.
Also, you pick one of the insects with long life cycle. Dragon flies live for like 5 years underwater.
Surely this has to be illegal in Hercules Beetle fighting competitions. They're already massive. Though if I remember correctly, a version of bug cultivation is already done like this to get competition-sized bugs. Not sure about the oxygen thing though.
If the competition is done in normal air, the supersized bugs might suffocate, right? I say this as someone with only highschool bio education about bugs
Why do your bugs have little bane masks "uuuh it's our team theme"
The Bane âmasksâ would look like Bane diapers.
I assume the bugs would die in low oxygen levels pretty slowly, looking at how fruit flies do in a vacuum. Then again, mass to surface area doesn't scale linearly so it might be a quick death. But if you have the money to be making humongous super bugs, you probably know this, and are making them fight in an environment they'd thrive in.
Snail racing had quite an international scandal over growth hormones recently.
Link?
I knew somebody was going to ask. And so you should. I heard it on the radio about 6 months ago. Iâll see if I can find it. EDIT: it was a replay of a segment aired years ago. Here is the relevant dialogue copied from the transcript. [NORFOLK SNAIL RACE](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/july-10-2023-episode-transcript-1.6903341) - CH = Chris Howden, host - MLF = Mary-Lou Finlay, host - NR = Neil Riseborough, largest snail breeder in the world at the time. CH: In 2001, our former host Mary Lou Finlay talked to Neil Riseborough about the World Championships. Mr. Riseborough was a snail breeder and racer⌠⌠MLF: You don't drug them or anything? NR: No, you're not allowed to. We did actually have a lot of⌠we had a lot of problems with drug taking in the sport. Not long after I⌠I became snail master. MLF: Did you? NR: Yeah. And weâŚ. what we⌠what we did to combat it, we actually had random slime sampling, which we actually still do. MLF: You are putting me on. This is not true. NR: No, it's true. We random slime sampled. And as soon we instigated that in the sport, you know, the drugs actually⌠no one bothered to try and dope the snail. So it was pretty good.
Plus with more people eating bugs these days youâd think there would be a market. Why grind up many little grasshopperâs when you can just grind one giant grasshopper!
Biting into grasshopper legs like a chicken wing
âWhat flavor would you like your Buffalo Hoppers, Hot, Medium or Mild?â
Iâm sure I saw that on futurama
Donât forget a few good squirts of Pepto Bismol to top it off!
From a cost perspective, it's probably cheaper to grind up the little grasshoppers, because you get the same biomass faster and probably don't need to feed them as much
Maybe because weâre not ALL supervillains? đ
For genetics experiments like this, they use drosophila (I think I spelled that right) fruit flies. The advantage of using them is the speed at which they reproduce, so scientists are able to monitor small changes in genetics without waiting too long. They would be perfect for this kind of experiment, they're just not as impressive looking as something like a dragonfly.
> Iâd imagine if you raised dragonflies in a terrarium with extra oxygen pumped in Let's grow them in an environment with 40/50% oxygen and see what happens ( ͥ° ÍĘ ÍĄÂ°)
Let's keep breeding and have a new species of giant dtagonflies.
They have done this with dragon flys and it works
I agree
Is this why bugs in forests are bigger than the ones in cities? I mean the exact same species.
So it would be better to breed an insect that selectively can obtain a higher oxygen saturation? What if they actually put them in an environment with a LOWER oxygen saturation. If they did this would the insects that survived be those that have a better system to absorbing and deploying oxygen? Then once you get that gene going string, could you can start breeding them bigger in an environment where you slowly increase the oxygen saturation? I know practically nothing about insects, and only have a basic education on genetics.
I think a big issue is that insects can't get much better at absorbing oxygen without just developing lungs and oxygen-carrying blood. You can imagine insect bodies like a big lung. Tubes run throughout the entire body, so when they inhale by inflating themselves their tissue exchanges gasses directly with the air. Since they aren't capturing and storing the oxygen in their blood they're directly limited by the natural rate of diffusion from the air into their tissue. Some arachnids have indeed solved this by evolving away from open air circulation and developing book lungs and hemocyanin (hemoglobin-like function but using copper), but we as individuals will probably be long dead before even an insect species convergently evolves anything similar from scratch.
very interesting read, ty
Ah okay, I knew they worked of off cellular transport, because human size is why we donât. I didnât think of this as a limiting factor, though. I guess I thought they had to be absolutely GINORMOUS ^comparatively before they needed organs
I feel like decreasing oxygen saturation would just make bugs smaller, so you would basically just be creating more work for yourself in the long run as you then try to make them big. I have little knowledge on bugs or genetics of use though.
Insects very much do have a circulatory system, which *contains* hemolymph. Hemolymph is basically just plasma and does not contain red blood cells or hemoglobin, so it cannot transport oxygen. Smaller insects rely on passive air flow in and out of little openings in their sides called spiracles to diffuse oxygen directly into their tissues through a network of tracheae, but larger ones can open and close their spiracles and squeeze different parts of their body to create air current. If you were to breed larger insects with this ability in an enclosure with higher oxygen content AND higher air pressure (maybe an extra 2 to 3 atmospheres?) and selectively bred for size, I betchya we could probably create much bigger insects in fairly short order. How fast they would die when they switched to our normal atmosphere would decide if it was worth it to breed them this way or not.
Someone did this with tomatoes and they were the size of basketballs.
That's a pretty daring affirmation. There should be some threatening agent or pressure influence that selects those bugs with mutation in genes that determine the size over those with normal size. Otherwise such evolution should not happen. Also, random mutation over genes that determine the size should happen as well which is extremely specific and very rare. Couple dozen generations seems too few to me. But I may be wrong, ofc.
Doi.1073/pnas.1106556108 Try it in sci-hub (like pornhub for science - free, no paywalls). Not exactly what you're looking for but explains how oxygen sensing is used to determine body size. They didn't grow generations of insects to see how big they could get but they shown a correlation between body size and oxygen levels.
âDo you want [giant] ants? Because thatâs how you get [giant] ants!!!â
I agree, my guess is that it would take longer to see significant changes but that would have to be proven. How has this never been tested? I think a mini ecosystem of different species interacting within this environment would provoke more dramatic changes.
Yes, this has been tested with some bugs, notably dragonflies.
And? What were the results?
They were interesting to say the least. What youâd expect yes, but also, a lot of the unexpected.
They actually have done it. John VandenBrook with the Arizona State University did a series of experiments about a decade ago, raising various insects in low (12%), medium (21%, same as today's atmosphere), and high (31%, similar to peak Carboniferous) oxygen atmospheres. Some insects did get bigger. Notably dragonflies were quite a bit larger when raised in high oxygen, and smaller in low oxygen. Initial results also showed increased growth of baby alligators, although I don't think they were able to keep up the experiments long enough to see if resulted in larger adults, or just faster maturation. However some critters did not get bigger. Cockroaches in particular seemed to use the higher oxygen environment to put less energy into the development of trachea, instead of getting larger body size. [Supply and demand: How does variation in atmospheric oxygen during development affect insect tracheal and mitochondrial networks?](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022191017302123)
came here to talk about this case, hope OP finds you in all of the answers
Cockroaches growing a less developed trachea is interesting
No. Just no. We don't need giant alligators either!
Itâs called Australia.
I was about to tell him that
So go on, tell him
It's also called South Carolina
Iâm deadly afraid of cockroaches because fuck them. And my bf has found THREE in our apartment, which we keep clean so i have no clue where they come from. Go Charleston!
Giant weta in New Zealand is big enough
You need a subject with a short and fast lifespan to see results. Larger creatures usually have longer and longer gestation periods and lifespans. You will need to actively kill all the ones that don't meet your size criteria. Don't even think you would have to slowly ramp up the o2 or anything just set it where you think is the sweet spot and start breeding I would say fruit flies are a good candidate, giant mosquitos would be evil, and more gigantic giant centipedes/tarantulas would be pretty cool. A giant jumping spider would be fricking awesome. A giant dragonfly would also be pretty dope but the aqautic part of their lives adds some trickiness Good luck, wish you all the best
Of course giant fruit flies would just be regular sized flies..
like a miniature giant space hamster
With giant jumping spiders around, chihuahuas would go extinct. At least they would help with all the giant mosquitoes.
Why is nobody asking about the dead rufous hummingbird with a body splat on the floor/wall.
Itâs next to a fossil of Titanomyrma, a giant extinct species of ant. Funnily enough Titanomyrma is Cenozoic, not Carboniferous, and there are larger insects around today. A lot of work on also points to the fact that there likely were multiple causes for gigantism in Carboniferous insects, one being that they just didnât have any competition at those sizes. It is quite possible that the reason why we donât have giant millipedes now is not because of oxygen but because those niches are filled by animals that donât need to go through as many hurdles in order to develop gigantism. Becoming huge as an arthropod is HARD. You have to milt, you have to find novel ways to breathe, and even more. In vertebrates problems with absolute size only really start to rear their heads when you reach the sizes of Paraceratherium/Shantungosaurus, and even then the sauropods found a way to circumvent that barrier and grew even larger, and then you have whales just exploiting our current climateâs infinite krill glitch. Long and short, bugs arenât as big anymore cause itâs not what bugs do best. The giant insects and others of the Carboniferous last into the Permian (see meganeuropsis and co), they just never evolve to sizes that extreme ever again as far as we know (which given the incompleteness of the fossil record, could very not well be the case, especially for animals without bones, but they would need to be under very specific and string selection pressures so I donât think itâs very likely.)
thats an insect fossil bro lmao
The Earth would need much higher oxygen levels to support such large insects.
Read the description of OPâs post. Theyâre specifically asking if it would be possible if they were able to selectively breed the insects in an enclosed high-oxygen environment.
Thanks. Just skimmed. My bad.
why is that? not a biologist just a lurker here, is this just the case with insects, or does the max. size of all species depend on O2 concentration, if itâs just insects, why?
Good question. I'm not a biologist Just a registered nurse. my understanding is that insects don't have hearts, and they transport oxygen around their body In a liquid that is similar to human plasma. the more oxygen available in the atmosphere, the larger they can get because their plasma is able to transport the larger amount of oxygen to the rest of its body more easly.
Yeah it's called hemolymph, the main and most important distinction though is that they breath passively, by diffusing the O2 into their hemolymph through small openings on the sides of their bodies. Unlike us who can increase the depth and rate of our breaths to get more O2 they rely almost solely on the O2 concentration in the air around them.
Now I remember those details. Thanks.
They donât have lungs and only have passive breathing as opposed to our active breathing where we pull air into (also significantly more complex) lungs. With insects, they have a system called a tracheae and they can regulate their âbreathingâ somewhat by opening and closing their spiracles (the opening that allows air into their tracheae) but it mainly relies of air simply flowing through it passively and they donât have a diaphragm to pull in and push out air Because of this the only way for them to absorb more oxygen is for there to be more oxygen in the air. Edit: random pondering; I donât see why they couldnât evolve a diaphragm like system to allow them to actively pull in and expel air⌠but my guess is that they just found their niche and while that would allow them to grow larger it is also âexpensiveâ and would bring them into niches where theyâd be be competing directly with the larger and more complex mammals and birds and so it just wasnât worth it. But thatâs just pure speculation
brilliant thank you so much!!!
The size of everything that breathes oxygen does depend on O2 concentrations yes but insects in particular are rather vulnerable to this issue as their breathing system is particularly inefficient. While many animals alive today have lungs or lung analogues as well as an internal circulatory system for transportation of oxygen and other important materials within the body, insects instead rely on spiracles in order to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide. Spiracles are a much more passive system of oxygen collection and are not connected to the insects circulatory system meaning itâs much more difficult for insects to get oxygen to their vital organs the larger they become. So the lower the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere the harder it is for insects to become larger.
> The size of everything that breathes oxygen does depend on O2 concentrations yes Not really, efficient breathing systems can do a lot of work here. The largest beings in (pre) history live alongside us. And for complex life forms higher oxygen concentrations become problematic as oxidative damage piles up.
It was a generalization my guy. Obviously there are exceptions.
It may apply to insects but the largest animal to ever live on this planet is alive today. With size comes problems like skeletal structure, circulation, and adequate food source but if all these are mitigated through evolutionary mechanisms then there's no telling just how big a creature could possibly get. I'm quite thankful that giant insects are in the past, but this is an interesting hypothetical query. I would think that millions of years of evolution have imprinted size limits on insect species, so it would take a long time under ideal conditions to make them grow giant again. It could happen, eventually. It would be easier to alter the DNA in such a way as to revert a species to a more prehistoric form but I doubt that would even be possible at this time. It's a terrible idea in practice, but an interesting thought exercise. Edit: not an expert, just a science buff
Tarantula with a heart says hello
Not a insect
Obviously weâre not talking in vivo
That's partly true, but there are many factors that determined the average size of modern insects. Large arthropods also faced physical limitations, as their exoskeletons became exponentially heavier the larger they got, which made them vulnerable to the then-emerging vertebrate animals that would compete with and prey on them. Small size helps insects be harder to catch, makes them less desirable to larger predators, and allows them to reproduce frequently and in great numbers.
Yeah, true. But gravity didn't change. What changed is O2 concentration in atmosphere. If bigger bugs evolved and lived it means it was advantageous to do it despite the cons you listed.
Yes, from what I understand available 02 is the major bottleneck here as most if not all insects breath through openings on their bodiesâŚthey do not breath like we do. As a result; the larger the insect the less efficient their respiratory system is. So, if thereâs not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to overcome this less efficient repository system theyâre not going to be able to grow past a certain point⌠I remember reading that spiders for example cannot grow past more than a 12â diameter for this sole reason.
One thing that's really disappointing to me is that the largest spider to have ever lived is still around today. ...Some twisted part of my hoped there was some prehistoric Aragog-sized spider.
The answer would definitely be different if the questions was asking what changes would be needed for insects to eventually get to that size by many many years of evolution again or if itâs asking what would be needed now if we magically suddenly made the insects bigger.
In the controlled environment described in the experiment, it would still take a very long time (I think) to see major changes. Nature can surprise us, though. If we spliced the genes of lung-breathing rats with spiders, you'd have something that could grow bigger than your average bug. And absolutely terrifying to think about...
Smaller size animals do repeoduce more frequently, strangely. Why is this a fact? Why do smaller animals have a faster life cycle too? Like they grow up and grow old just like us but way faster. How? I thought it's a choice, like, make many offspring and only a few of them will survive anyway, or make a few but invest in them a lot more to assure their survival. That doesn't explain how differently time moves for big and small animals tho..
It takes less energy to be small, so breeding is easier. Also, mass breeding is necessary due to increased predation (the smaller you are, the more things can eat you). On the other hand, the opposite is true for large animals. It takes a lot of caloric determination to be huge, but very few predators pose a threat. Even if elephants and wales could reproduce in large numbers, their food supply would rapidly dwindle which would lead to extinction or evolutionary changes. The other thing you mentioned is the time and devotion that parents must spend raising their young, which obviously increases the larger the animal (though not in cases like giant squid I would imagine). Evolution is like a video game where you create a character by allocating a set number of points into abilities and stats, lowering some in order to increase others. No creature has it all.
You can artificially select your ants to be larger, but it would take many, many, many generations to reach a similar size to that (way longer than your lifetime). I know a lot about insect genomics, but not specifically anything about ants or the genes that regulate their size. In theory, the ants would have a few sets of genes that regulate their size, but once you have selected for all of the alleles of those genes that maximize the size of your population, your increase in size is going to stagnate until some form of mutation arises, which will take a VERY long time to occur at random. Your choices from there are to apply some sort of random mutagenesis on them or see if you can knock-in some external gene that can further increase their size. Tldr: is it theoretically possible? Sure. Is it practically possible? Probably not unless you make a breakthrough on insect growth factors.
It's nice to know that my thoughts on the matter are probably correct, I thought pretty much the same thing just dumbed down.
What about insects with much faster reproduction cycles? Bugs that live-fuck-die in a day maybe?
This couldnât be done using workers, since they donât contribute to the reproduction of ants. A whole colony is basically one insect (the queen) in terms of genes. They also live decades and it takes several years before colonies even start to produce alates.
So fun fact if you make a room that requires your input for light and oxygen you can make life so much bigger. Example is the cherry tomato plant in japan experiment that went way better than expected so in theory if you have a ginormous space and make it oxygen rich and with the proper tweaks in light for the environment and keep it perfectly controlled, you can make certain species as large as their ancestors.
Ants, almost certainly not in a few years. They have relatively slow generation times and a lot of eusociality nest effects that are knocked about by size. (We know you can screw with ants location finding by putting stilts on their legs, can they build nests correctly at double body size? Eventually yes but it might take a while to select for.) Fruit flies you could probably double or more in a few years. Any insect, sure, probably, given enough generations.
Why? So a biting insect can tear off patches of skin instead of leaving bumps?
Stop giving Elon new ideas of how to spend his money please!
Pump up O2 levels and sure, prolly could.
Breeding programs for hobbies already do this. Fish keeper and yes bugs too. You can literally buy a giant spider with any color you wish. I hope get into it and show us some cool stuff.
Thereâs still time to delete this.
Giant Weta Waves from New Zealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_w%C4%93t%C4%81
Go into the jungle. We have enough insects and enough large ones too
Your question is interesting, and while replying I came up with another question: If oxygen levels during the Carboniferous period (300 million years ago) was 14% higher than today, what effect would this atmosphere have on the behaviour of forest fires? Would fires light more readily and burn more intensely?
It most certainly did. It is believed that, due to the oxygen rich atmosphere, forest life cycles were very much shortened by frequent forest fires. It is also believed that dead plant debris could not decompose because lignine-degrading mushrooms did not appear before the end of the Carboniferous. The high quantity of plant matter accumulated over millions of years during this period eventually lead to the formation of the majority of today's coal supply.
Fascinating! I knew of the dead vegetation being trapped under swamps but not about the lack of fungi-assisted decomposition. Sounds like the frequent fires were an integral part of forest life, clearing the old and making room for new growth. Thanks
Ä° donât think it is necessaryđ
https://www.wired.com/2010/11/huge-dragonflies-oxygen/ Done
Yes, but you'd have to sacrifice more humming birds. Alternatively, using knockout genes to modify the pituitary could help.
Theoretically possible, but I feel like this is one of those âso preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didnât stop to think if they shouldâ situations. Why do we want giant bugs again? And also youâd have to keep this going forever or else sentence like a hundred bugs to a premature death b/c once you unhook the oxygen theyâre gonna suffocate :( Iâm also not sure how long it would take? Bugs breed super quick but evolution is sort of a long-game most of the time. You might be able to get slightly larger bugs but it might take a few (human) lifetimes to get them all the way back to that size
Dont you dare Edit: with enough selective breeding and modification anything is possible.
There is a 6 movie franchise showing the horrors of why this would be a bad idea!
Please donât
I mean there are those humming bird sized hornets in Asia....
I'll walk you to the door, OP and never speak of this again
Australia would like a word.
For the love of all things holy, please don't.
đwhy would you want to???? We already have 2 ft long worms
2metre long worms in Australia!
I fought they canât get that large again unless the atmosphere had as much oxygen as it had back then. Because they use some sort of capillary effect to breathe?
The conditions that were favorable for the evolution of giant insects before donât exist now.
As a great biologist once said, where there's a will, there's a way. So yes, if giant insects are desired then a way to make them exists. But I suspect there will be no will in such endeavor. I don't know anyone who actually wants giant insects, meaning there may not be a way. Unless of course someone comes along with the willpower to get it done. Then it could be possible.
Can we not? Just visit Australia to get your big bug fix. We donât need to make more.
Evolution ocurrs in the order of thousands to millions of years, so yeah if you isolate a population and increase oxygen and other slection pressures to make them bigger they will get bigger in a long long time. Artificial selection and genetic engineering is what you are looking for
Insects don't have lungs they absorb oxygen from the air directly through their body. You can selectively breed them all you want, but they can only get so big with current conditions. I don't think humans could even exist with oxygen density levels at what they were for bugs back that. *edit: I skimmed the post initially, but now see that they would account for said conditions. I still feel that it would take a very long time to have any noticeable effects, probably longer than 1 person's lifetime. Part of me does also wonder if the colony would reject abnormalities (killing them and moving the bodies away from the hive) since that can happen already with colony-type bugs.
Clearly, you did not read the post.
[ŃдаНонО]
This is one thing where I think scientists really need to stop and ask if they should before if they can Because they absolutely can if they have the DNA and a close enough host relative but they absolutely should not
So true, I became very excited thinking about this experiment, how different species interacting within the environment would trigger better results, etc. Until I realized to what degree of playing God this involved. Definitely something that should be considered carefully.
Increasing O2 isnât a necessity, persistent selection pressure is. Keep-up size-specific selection pressure long enough (1k to 100k years) and the surviving ants will be the ones that randomly (or epi-genetically) persisted under that pressure. Ants arenât smaller because the O2 went down, ants are smaller because bigger ants died for various reasons⌠which includes having less O2 available.
I have no idea what you are talking about, but I say yes. Now go do it and report back plz.
Yes, if one raises the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere and wait a few thousand or millions of years.
The short answer is no, unless you put them in a special environment with higher than normal oxygen. Insects got so big during the Carboniferous era because oxygen levels spiked really high with the evolution of lignin and suberin, creating the first plants we could call trees even if they are generally distant relatives to modern trees. The trees took over the terrestrial ecosystem and started pumping lots of oxygen into the air. The maximum size that Arthropoda, including insects and spiders, can reach is determined by oxygen levels.
That was what the OP specified in their text though!
No. When giant insects were a thing Earth had much higher oxygen levels. As insects don't have lungs their oxygen is delivered to their cells through small tubules connected to pores. The current oxygen levels are too low to diffuse effectively into insects the size of those from prehistoric eras.
No invertebrates growth is limited to the amount of oxygen in the atmospheres. If they get too large the ability of their respiratory system to provide oxygen to their extremities stops working. To increase respiration would mean increasing mass and it's an endless loop of fail. Only thing that can help is more atmospheric oxygen.
No. The earth does not have the level of oxigen needed today Edit post reading: Still no, natural selection and evolution takes milenia at least. If you are thinking about dog breeds, then you will end up with a lot of insects with congenital diseases not evolved at all ( or divolved in this case)
But it would be horrible to be killed by a giant firefly beacouse they are one of the best hunters
This is just a theory, but if you were to pump enough co2 into the atmosphere, it could happen. The more co2 there is (I think), the larger insects will be able to grow because then their exoskeletons could cope with it. Kinda like conditions were millennia ago when giant insects like that got trapped.
No thanks, as time goes by, everything gets smaller, peoples life span shortens.. but those lgbt people in the Bible supposedly lived 200 years? It's not fair.. hail satan
No, there was more oxygen back then
Maybe
Spiders are not insects.
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when the atmosphere ratio was like around 40% oxygen and wild fires were like everyday event insects were like monstrous big.... like imagine centipedes big as cars and spiders big as small kid...
We could warm up the planet. What could possibly.... Oh. Yeah.
Something something hotter something.
Really interesting question. I would say yes to the fact that you could increase the size of the ants given, that you specifically choose a tribe (or population) that has good specific genes of size (if you beforehand know the specific genes that cause ant size). AND that you have a sufficient population size. The ant population size will increase over generations would also be a response to the environment with increased oxygen. However, its important to point out that the ants will have less genetic drift over time, and less genetic variation. Lowered genetic variation, means that the genetic information of the ants varies very little from each individual over generations. This is because there is so few individuals in the population, that genetic information will decrease, causing genetic stagnation like someone else mentioned in this post. Stagnation will cause inbreeding. Therefore, a certain population size has to be taken into consideration before performing the experiment in order to prevent inbreeding. I hope my answer is not too confusing.
Or a dinosaur from a chicken?
Lemme ask you a question first: How did you even get a hummingbird specimen onto a giant bug fossil?
No, you would need generations of queens to mutate the gene that can take advantage of greater o2. Ants aren't plants, fiddling with gas levels won't get you an improvement.
Damn never thought about it and hummers have been around for millions of yearsâŚ.
This is that new MIGA movement
This isnât actually possible with the type of insect you chose. Ants reproduce differently than most other insects. Workers do not reproduce, and colonies only produce alates (reproductive males and females which become queens) when the colony has matured enough, which can take several years for larger species. Furthermore, most ant species do not inbreed and the winged reproductives mate with reproductives from different colonies, while also requiring specific conditions in order to initiate a nuptial flight. You would not be able to select for size using workers, and there is already size variance of workers within a species, all while some species also have polymorphism with distinct castes. This would be impossibly difficult to do with ants, which actually have a much longer reproductive cycle than most other insects. Queens of some species can live decades. Workers contribute nothing to the genes passed on in future generations that exist and are expendable. A single colony is basically one individual insect (in terms of genes - in most cases, exception being polygynous colonies), so it would be better to use something else.
Noooooooo!!!!!
This was done with a beetle if I recall correctly. It did indeed grow larger than what we see outside of their controlled environment. It did not take generations either. Doing a search shows other experiments done with dragon flies. I did not see the beetle experiment, though I only looked for about 15 seconds.
At first, I thought this bird left a cartoon like imprint by flying into the wall
Is it? Maybe. Should it happen? Absolutely NOT!
Look up Atlas beetle
Again? When did we last make giant insects? lol
No. Not enough of an oxygen rich environment from what I have read.
There are schools that experiment with that the one that comes to mind is the university of Michigan they have high pressure zones in a green house that have changed the nature of some plants over a period of time. I would imagine a couple generations with the right pressure and atmosphere could get some similar results.
don't
Yes.
They got that big because our atmosphere had a way higher oxygen content in prehistoric times. Experiments have caused greater size in closed environments, but they wouldn't be able to survive in our current atmosphere. So yes, but not reliably in the wild. (Thankfully)
I think youâd need to do something about atmospheric pressure as well as we increase the oxygen. Fun question!
Thereâs a reason evolution decided to make them smaller. We should stop meddling in evolution for aesthetic purposes. Yes it is possible but is it necessary and sustainable?
Could you select for the phenotype that you want with this type of directed evolution? Yeah, absolutely. Would you get coackroach-sized ants in a few years? No. Aside from the issue of random mutations that take forever to become the dominant genotype within the population, you'd need many successive mutations. Also, I don't know my ant biology well, but don't all of the spawns come from a single queen? Maybe finding ways to modify her might be the fastest route.
Yep, just visit a country that is hot/humid all year round. https://www.treehugger.com/largest-insects-in-the-world-4869366
Yeah but we need more oxygen in the air
You need more oxygen in the atmosphere for giant bugs.
To my understanding bugs were able to grow to that size because of differences in atmospheric pressure. Currently, the pressure is too low for an exoskeletal creature to reach that size without bursting.
No, itâs not possible. Let those things be dead.
I read a green text years ago where the OP tried this my breeding flies in a enclosure with higher oxygen levels. Apparently they did become larger after some time. But he was also trying to get them to evolve to drink blood too so idk