pirate-blues said:

LuSiD enthusiast said:

pirate-blues said:

Well they would cover more ground, though they may be less agile.


Honestly, if arachnids were the size of people I would off myself in a heartbeat. I cleaned out my basement last month after letting some stuff sit for the winter/spring, and holy shit, it was covered in spiders .


Could. not. deal.


But before the dinosaurs(I forget the official name for the era), giant insects roamed the earth because the atmosphere was pretty much bloated with oxygen compared to now(or any other time).

---

I agree. I have a theory that when god designed spiders, he literally targeted what would be mankinds biggest fear. Like they are the gold standard for fictional monsters and all things horrible. You can't believe how scared i was to open this thread(i almost never open a thread with spiders in the title) out of fear of seeing one. If i ever open a page on my phone and a spider appears, i literally get paralyzed in fear and can't move until my battery dies.

I really appreciate the shroomery for not having spiders on this thread 5 shrooms for all of you.

FYCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK. i scrolled up and saw i missed one.

---

....you're right.


I can fix that!!!

---

Thanx for putting the spoiler bars, no way in fuck am i clicking it. Even if its scientifically the worlds best tits begind there, its not worth it to see them since im 99% sure its spiders. Fuck you.

Shroomslip said:

Shroomslip said:

Going off the top of my head and something I looked up a while back, no. Put simply the mass of their legs slamming into the ground to scale up the speed would put too much stress on the legs and they'd snap. Bone or exoskeleton.

---

Really depends on the spider you're talking about, but in general, once you scale it up, you're looking at speeds of hundreds of mph. Then there's also the problem of muscle power to contend with. To run faster you have to push harder, to push harder you need more muscle. Which adds overall weight and then we need more power just to compensate for the extra weight.

For the record I had wondered if cockroaches human sized would still be able to run proportionally as fast as there smaller brethren. Turns out, no they couldn't physiologically.

---

Quote:

VIRGINIA BEACH, VA (October 11, 2006) - The delicate lady bug in your garden could be frighteningly large if only there was a greater concentration of oxygen in the air, a new study concludes. The study adds support to the theory that some insects were much larger during the late Paleozoic period because they had a much richer oxygen supply, said the study's lead author Alexander Kaiser.

The study, "No giants today: tracheal oxygen supply to the legs limits beetle size,'' will be presented Oct. 10 and 11 at Comparative Physiology 2006: Integrating Diversity. The conference will be held Oct. 8-11 in Virginia Beach. The research was carried out by Alexander Kaiser and Michael C. Quinlan of Midwestern University, Glendale, Arizona; J. Jake Socha and Wah-Keat Lee, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL; and Jaco Klok and Jon F. Harrison, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. Harrison is the principal investigator.

The Paleozoic period, about 300 million years ago, was a time of huge and abundant plant life and rather large insects -- dragonflies had two-and-a-half-foot wing spans, for example. The air's oxygen content was 35% during this period, compared to the 21% we breathe now, Kaiser said. Researchers have speculated that the higher oxygen concentration allowed insects to grow much bigger.

---

koods said:

Shroomslip said:

Shroomslip said:

Going off the top of my head and something I looked up a while back, no. Put simply the mass of their legs slamming into the ground to scale up the speed would put too much stress on the legs and they'd snap. Bone or exoskeleton.

---

Really depends on the spider you're talking about, but in general, once you scale it up, you're looking at speeds of hundreds of mph. Then there's also the problem of muscle power to contend with. To run faster you have to push harder, to push harder you need more muscle. Which adds overall weight and then we need more power just to compensate for the extra weight.

For the record I had wondered if cockroaches human sized would still be able to run proportionally as fast as there smaller brethren. Turns out, no they couldn't physiologically.

---

The limiting factor for the size of animals with exoskeletons is oxygen concentration of the atmosphere. Since Arachnids and insects must breathe through their exoskeletons, the amount of surface area per volume decreases as the animal gets larger. Fact is, when oxygen levels were higher in the past, insects and Arachnids were much larger.

---