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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Insects passively breathe.
Instead of having organs like lungs which pump air in-and-out, they just have a series of tubes all along their sides which allow air to get in and that is how they perform gas exchange.
This is very efficient on the small scale, and it allows them to breathe without using any energy at all. But as the insect gets bigger it’s demand for oxygen increases quicker than the limited amount of surface area in these tubes can supply.
Having an external exoskeleton also limits how much an organism can grow, but since coconut crabs are dramatically larger than the largest insect alive today that is clearly not the biggest limiting factor on insects.
And the truly gigantic insects were before the dinosaurs evolved, long before the Jurassic. They were around when the oxygen levels were higher, so the passive breathing was still able to get more oxygen into their bodies.
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