Club:

I once read something that confirms your statement--sort of.

IIRC, it wasn't the oxygen content that made the difference, although it might have.

The problem is that their primitive--by mammalian standards-- respiratory systems (and possibly the other bodily systems as well--especially the circulatory system) become more and more inefficient as the insect's size increases.

Which is why you had dragonflies with a two-foot wingspan during the age of the dinosaurs--the Cretaceous period, I think, although I'm not sure.

(As I said, I'm not disagreeing with you; I just don't recall reading anything that implied that the air was that much different from what we're breathing today--aside from modern-day pollution, and the fact that the climate was vastly different--swampland in places that couldn't support that climate nowadays, for instance.)

Other insect-like creatures, such as the arachnids and their distant relatives (spiders, scorpions, centipedes and the like) may have the same problem--I'm not certain of the differences in their bodily systems.

As someone put it in a book I read many years ago (I'm not certain how long--I think I read it in high school, and I graduated in 1982):

The giant insects and arachnids of nightmares--and horror films--are PHYSIOLOGICAL IMPOSSIBILITIES.

Shadowrun gets around that little bit of science by throwing magic into the mix.

--Foreigner

They covered the ciculatory system in Mimic, and iirc, the biomechanical hydrolic like system that moves insect and arachnid limbs aren't efficient enough at large sizes for the creature to move, they'd collapse under their own weight.

Man, insect resperatory systems are not primitive they are simply optimized for small size. They are very advanced, and perform much better than ours do. Insects have networks of air filled tubes, called trachea, running through thier bodies directly contacting muscles and other high oxygen requiring organs. Some of the larger, more active insects even breath, flexing these tubes to increase airflow, though the system is so efficient that most insects don't have to do this and can rely on passive diffusion to supply enough oxygen. Insects transfer oxygen much faster than mamallian lungs, which aren't even a very advanced design for large land animals. Bird lungs are vastly better with thier two stage breathing.

Really mamilian lungs are only a step above the dumbest dedicated breathing organ that can possibly work for a large land animal, a big sack of air connected to the outside by a long skinny tube which is also used for eating that can expand and contract by about 50%. The only really good optimization is the many branches and aveoli massively increasing surface area over, say, a frog lung which is more of just a wrinkled bag. Bird lungs are a huge leap beyond this. Exchanging a much higher percentage of the air in the lungs with each breath (meaning that the air they are actually absorbing has more oxygen in it than ours) and using counter-current blood flow to extract more of the oxygen from it (meaning that they get more of the oxygen out of the air they breath than we do) is is pretty complicated though. Even our hearts aren't that great. Crocodiles are better. Insect's don't need complicated hearts because they don't use blood to transfer oxygen. They just need to stir around nutrients and hormones fast enough. Really our blood flowing so quickly is a pretty big waste, almost nothing in there needs to move that fast but we are wasting lots of energy pumping it all around at breakneck pace.

I recall several reasons for the giant flying insects. Firstly there was a somewhat higher percentage of oxygen in the air (google says about 50% more than today). Secondly the air pressure was quite a bit higher. Like 20% or something. Thicker air makes flying easier. Thirdly there were no birds to eat them. The air was a safer place back then than it is today. Those flying reptiles weren't nearly as good as a modern bird (if even they existed at the same time, not sure edit: Nope, land vertebrates may not even have existed for another 50+ million years). Also consider that a dragonfly with a two foot wingspan really still isnt that big of an animal. Dragonflies have very long very very thin wings. You are probably talking about a body roughly the size of a pen. Some of the largest spiders and millipedes probably aren't that much smaller than those dragonflies (though the milipedes of the carboniferous were giant too).

Besides the idiotic thing in mimic was that they had one insect colony evolving. One of anything cannot evolve (in the biological sense). Evolution works through population genetics: no population -> no evolution.

....oh dear. I'm afraid.

Oh, NO!

What have I DONE?!?



--Foreigner

Tube sock.

~J

But if they were, they'd kick all the other freshwater fish's asses!

Dunno ... as fish go, Pike are pretty strong themselves.

By the way, the higher oxygen content long ago was the cause of higher air preasure... oxygen is more dense than our current air mix. It meant flying was easier, as was breathing, but so was burning.

JaronK

Care bear

geased to show their belly when casting

Although it'd be a blast if this was a totem that would give Dove a run for it's pacifistic money, it'd be even better if in the middle of a fight, the Care Bear shaman stood, faced his enemies, whipped up his shirt, shouted, "Care Bear Stare!"

And hit them with a F6 Toxic Wave.

I know goose is an actual totem ,especially in Hawaii

but some ore fun Geasa


Have to go "HONK! HONK HONK!" for centering

Walk with group in "V" formation everywhere they go

And a dietary Geasa, bread torn into small chunks

I once got picked up by a team who used a Fainting Goat Shaman. Now that guy was Frigg'n useless. I shoulda guessed that things were gonna get bad the J asked me about my Doc Wagon contract. Oh yeah, while I mentioning it, never work with a guy named Big Jaw Steve.