Eli5 why no big Insects?

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Okay so I’m sure if you’ve read in history that sometime around Jurassic age that insects were like stupidly big due to O2 saturated environments. why can’t we manufacture an enclosed space with gradually increasing oxygen saturation over a few generations and see how big we can get insects?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

There are a lot of factors that limit the size of insects. The big one, as you guessed, is oxygen. Since they don’t have lungs, and their blood doesn’t carry oxygen, they can’t grow too big or their inside tissues will die from lack of oxygen.

We could manufacture enclosed spaces with high oxygen levels, and people have done that on a small scale, but making a large scale oxygen chamber creates a huge fire hazard, and there really isn’t much demand for giant insects. They wouldn’t make very good pets, because you’d have to keep them in a sealed oxygen chamber, and insects tend not to live very long. So you might get a giant dragonfly, but it would probably only live a couple of months. Making a chamber big enough for them to reproduce would be a massive undertaking.

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