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

If we wanted, we could create a study and situation that slowly increased insect size through selective breeding in an artificial oxygen environment. But why?

They can’t survive outside that environment, so they can’t live outside the lab. We’re not really learning anything too special, as we can already examine insects (and the new ones we make are probably different from their peers).

It’d also take a *long* time. A very long time. And there are lots of other factors to consider. It’s not an on/off switch. While insects may grow slightly bigger in environments with more oxygen, they don’t become giant instantaneously. It’s that, over time, traits for larger sizes may be able to survive and breed to the point a new species evolves that is bigger.

Remember, evolution is a complicated system with a lot of chance involved. That’s why we’d have to selectively breed these things ourselves to make them big. While their may be small slight increases in size (just like human height varies based on nutrition from birth), to get giant insects would be real tough.

TLDR: While potentially possible, it takes too long, costs too much, and really has no purpose.

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