Giant wasps and other bugs

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9 Comments

I have a fear of giant wasps,spiders,ants and other bugs. I mean like the size of an SUV or bigger. A wasp that big is the most terrifying thing to imagine. It would be so much more dangerous than a tiger or a crocodile or shark. Iknown they don't exist and its irrational but giant bugs scare the hell out of me. Why didn't they evolve to be huge? I mean nothing would fuck with a wasp the size of a ups truck. *shudders*

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67% Normal
Based on 9 votes (6 yes)
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Comments ( 9 )
  • Hatchet
    6 years ago | pl

    there use to be giant insects when the dinosaurs were around due to the atmosphere containing more oxygen, but thankfully their not alive anymore

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  • lordofopinions
    5 years ago

    Normal. Lots of people are uneasy around bugs wasps insects.

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  • Jonniebonnire
    6 years ago

    Dont even get me started on wasps, I HATE THEM, including ants, fruit flies, mosquitos, and other bugs

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  • Ellenna
    6 years ago

    Why are you scaring yourself with thoughts of creatures that don't exist? Maybe it'd be better to assess your life and work out what you're REALLY scared of and do something about that?

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    • Anonymous Post Author
      6 years ago

      I am REALLY scared of the giant insects. Maybe we can confront our fears together and let a human sized praying mantis correct your god awful British teeth. Orthodontics and dentistry is your biggest fear. Right?

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      • Ellenna
        6 years ago

        Do you get any exercise other than jumping to false conclusions? I'm not british, I'm australian, but true I did have terrible teeth, partly a genetic thing and then my parents being too poor to pay a dentist except a cheapo one who didn't do any fillings, only extractions. I never even heard of orthodontics until I was an adult and by then it was far too late.

        Going t the dentist has never been my biggest fear, but if it had been at least I would've been scared of something real instead of non-existent monsters I conjured up out of my own imagination.

        I have really good teeth now, false ones.

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  • RoseIsabella
    6 years ago

    OMG! Flashback of my shitty life on September the 9th!

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  • _Mehhhh_
    6 years ago

    They didn't evolve to be huge because it would slow them down immensely, with their body structures how they are. I can't remember the name of it, but there's some rule of physics about this. If you were to blow an insect up to twice it's original size, it would gain a little more strength, but it would gain a lot more weight disproportionately, which would slow it down. Same goes for any animal. If an insect wanted to be both bigger and faster, without tiring itself out, it would have to evolve into something that has a much stronger support structure. An invertebrate build and loads of spindly little legs isn't good for this.

    A non-living analogy would be with buildings. If you want a building as massive (and heavy) as The Empire State building to stay up, you're not going to build it with the same materials and structure that you'd build a small apartment block. If you tried that, you wouldn't even get very far building it before it falls on top of you. It's the same principle with animals. The bigger something is, the more strength it needs to work and live efficiently, and insects lack strength with their current body structure, so they remain small to get the most out of it.

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    • Boojum
      6 years ago

      What you're thinking of is the square-cube law, first described by Galileo. When an object is increased in size, the new surface area is proportional to the square of the multiplier, while its new volume is proportional to the cube of the multiplier.

      This is why elephants have huge ears and shrews have to eat almost constantly. Elephants have a large volume relative to their surface area, so they have problems getting rid of metabolic heat. Shrews have a huge surface area relative to their volume, so they have to work hard to fuel their metabolism and maintain their body temperature.

      The principle does limit the size of insects, but not quite in the way you suggest.

      Insects don't breathe the same way that we do. Oxygen travels to insect tissues through tiny openings in the body walls called spiracles. A given volume of living tissue has a fixed requirement for oxygen. If the volume of living tissue increases, the exoskeleton of the insect needs more spiracles to supply oxygen. Once you get to a certain volume of living tissue, the insect needs an exoskeleton that's more holes than solid.

      There are fossils of huge insects, including predatory dragonflies the size of seagulls, from the Carboniferous period about 300 million years ago. It's believed that they were able to grow so huge because oxygen levels in the atmosphere were much higher than they are today.

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