the title is pretty self explanatory why can’t bugs be big
In: Biology
A couple house cleaning things first.
A “Bug” is a specific term but often used colloquially to mean itty bitty insects and the like. Beatles, spiders, flies, are not actually bugs but we still can call them that because the English language is fun.
Second “big” is subjective. A big spider might be an inch in size. While the largest ones can get nearly a foot in size. But when you say big I think you mean large like a dog.
It has to do with most bugs anatomy.
For example spiders don’t have muscles in their legs. How do they move? Their heart pumps fluid into their legs. This fluid builds up in pressure and can extend their leg or contract their leg depending on the pressure.
Ants don’t have lungs. How do they breath? They are so small and require so little oxygen that it enters through pours in their “skin”.
As you start to scale up small bugs into larger creatures, their anatomy stops working. They would need muscles to move instead of fluid pumped into their legs. They would need lungs instead of pours in their ‘skin’. Their carapaces would be so heavy that they wouldn’t be able to lift them, etc.
But what if the bugs could change so that they acquired the things they needed to survive being big? Well those already exist. We call them animals. Bears, dogs, cats, cows, birds, etc. Their biology fits their size. If scaled down to a bugs size you’d find that their biology also fails in the same way as if bugs were scaled up.
Latest Answers