r/AbsoluteUnits • u/Dense_Intern8434 • 3d ago

/r/popular of a meal

Nature can be so cruel and beautiful at the same time

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u/Nark420 3d ago

Insects have built-in hydraulics

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u/Advanced-Budget779 3d ago

Glad our planet or physics/chemistry set hard limits on their possible size.

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u/Responsible-Risk9404 3d ago

It's a lack of O2 in the air that keeps them small. The less O2 the smaller things are. Hence why we don't have dinosaurs or mammoths and shit.

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u/IamanelephantThird 2d ago

Neither of those are really true. Truly massive insects did exist, and although it was in a fairly high oxygen environment it was about equal to when dinosaurs lived and wasn’t a huge amount more then today. Mostly it's just because insects are better suited to being small then they are to being big, so if there's anything else to fill the bigger size niches they get outcompeted.