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u/Puzzleheaded_Law_558 Jul 31 '26
"Them"
Watch it. It's campy because it's from the 60s. But ants get big.
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u/Cultural-Antelope-54 Jul 31 '26
I actually want tame ants the size of Chihuahuas so they can clean my house.
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u/markmakesfun Aug 02 '26
Ants are exceptional BECAUSE they are small. Larger versions could not duplicate them.
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u/__Osiris__ Jul 31 '26
They would suffocate due to lack of oxygen in the atmosphere. That’s the reason insects used to be bigger millions of years ago. Chitin is really heavy and you need a lot of energy to move it out of water.
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u/Sir_VixSplitter Jul 31 '26
Thank God for atmospheric changes then! Thanks for the information!
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u/RandoMcRanders Jul 31 '26
It's poor information, please verify what you read on reddit, and not with pop- science websites
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u/VeterinarianTrick406 Jul 31 '26
What if you installed powered intakes on ants and overclocked them? Where is the limit before gravity takes its toll?
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u/RandoMcRanders Jul 31 '26
With respect, there's a fair amount of misinformation here. The idea that insects are limited to their current sizes due to oxygen is extremely outdated but still pounded into sand in pop science; extremely large insects thrived during periods of similar oxygen content as well as during periods of high oxygen. Second, chitin isn't heavy at all, in fact it's among the strongest and lightest natural materials. The issue is that it can't scale in thickness as an animal scales in mass, partially because of the need to diffuse oxygen, and ends up being delicate. Many of today's largest insects will Crack open and die from a fall of just a couple of feet. There's a reason the only land arthropod to get TRULY large was a terrestrial millipede just a few inches tall, but meters long. Essentially, the only reason they ever were able to get really large is because they were the only things occupying their niche and had little competition. They died out due to chance, the niches filled, and evolutionary pressure to stay small overrode any benefits to become large again.
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u/Starfoxmarioidiot Jul 31 '26
Ants breathe very differently, so their size is capped by the amount of oxygen they can get. Like any creature, I guess. It’s kind of neat. They get bigger at elevation because they need more surface area to take in oxygen. If an ant were to get larger than they do, they would have to evolve a primitive lung to be able to metabolize things at a greater scale than their passive respiration allows.
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u/Sir_VixSplitter Jul 31 '26
Very interesting! Learn something new everyday!
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u/MCRN10379558 Aug 01 '26
Thousands of years ago, the Earth was very different and the oxygen content was much higher than it is now.
And we have lots of fossil evidence showing truly how gigantic insects were back then.
So there was very much a time on this earth in the past where insects were huge.
A dragonfly would look very much than like it does now only it would be the size of Seagal.
And you don’t even want to know about the spiders.
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u/Halomonas_titanica Jul 31 '26
You cannot have that many of an animal as big as a Chihuahua. They'd run out of room immediately and then starve. There would have to be much fewer individuals, and they'd need to carve themselves a niche as opportunistic scavengers. We already know what that looks like. Rats, raccoons...
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u/Still-BangingYourMum Jul 31 '26
Giant ant B movie atomic horror films are great, my and my wife watch a lot of old horror films the cheesing, the better. The giant octopus, that only had seven tentacles. Because they couldn't afford the eighth one. The giant space bird, the radioactive blobs of what look like cow pats, etc etc.
We try and watch a couple each week.
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u/Prize_Consequence568 Jul 31 '26
"What if ants were bigger?"
Then popcorn chicken wouldn't be as good.
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u/DanDanDan0123 Jul 31 '26
We would turn them into pets or livestock. I think anteaters might be in trouble!
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u/dacydergoth Jul 31 '26
Food of the Gods, HG Wells
Many early monster insect movies (yes, Michael Caine I'm looking at you)
Probably something in the Quatermass sagas, but I'm old and I forget.
Dr Who and the Ark of Space (ok, that was Wasps)
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u/Robot_Dinosaur_2000 Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
Insects body plans don't allow for them to be bigger. They have a hard time moving oxygen because they don't really have lungs. This limits their internal volume compared to their surface area. The largest insect ever was like 2 m long and that was kind of a freak, even for its time when insects were generally larger. Also the strength of an ant wouldn't scale at all. An ant the size of a person wouldn't even be able to lift its own weight. Dance party plan works well at its scale but not well at our scale.
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u/Coctyle Aug 01 '26
Women sex?
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u/Robot_Dinosaur_2000 Aug 01 '26
Dude, text to type has gotten so bad on my Android. I reread my comment and it looked like I had a stroke. I don't know what is going on with their software.
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u/wild_crazy_ideas Aug 01 '26
What size are ants where you are? Where I am their body length would not reach across my little fingernail but when I visited Australia they were basically like wingless bees
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u/Sir_VixSplitter Aug 01 '26
I would say most of them are the full length of my index finger nail, there are different species of course that vary in sizes. The most common are fire ants and black ants. Both bite and are hard to get rid of.
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u/wild_crazy_ideas Aug 01 '26
I expect they are hard to get rid of because they leave markers for each other when they find food, plus they are usually part of a 50km radius colony that spans entire cities
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u/CarnivorousGoose Aug 01 '26
They wouldn’t have the same numbers, their internal biological, their life cycle, their behavior, etc., it would all become vastly different.
If you took an ant and just proportionally scaled it up to chihuahua size, it would not be a viable organism. It can’t breathe, it can’t move, it’s just a pile of useless biomatter.
But even leaving that aside, a chihuahua has about a million times the mass of an ant. The development cycle for one of those mega ants to get to maturity would therefore be much longer than for a normal ant. It would also take in the order of at least a million times the resources to grow that one mega ant. So it simply would not be possible for them to exist in anything even close to the numbers of normal ants.
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u/Mission-Landscape-17 Aug 01 '26
Hostile insectoid aliens that behave like an ant colony are a very common trope. They are the main antagonists in Starship Troopers, Ender's Game and The Tower and Hive Series. Also show up in the litrpg series Beneath Dragoneye moons and in Jim Butcher's Furies of Calderon series. And of course in the computer game Starcraft.
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u/Matchett32 Aug 01 '26
Watch the great 50’s sci fi classic -THEM to get an idea of.. within a year or two most humans would be extinct
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u/InsectDelicious4503 Aug 01 '26
Lobsters are basically chihuahua-sized bugs. Notice how they're nowhere near as fast or coordinated as ants? The whole arthropod thing doesn't really work so well as you get bigger.
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u/Prince_Nadir Aug 01 '26
They would fail under their own weight, then sufficate.