Lots of sci-fi films depict giant bugs preying on hapless victims. A common influence for ‘monster-y’ aliens is to make them bug-like, since many people have a natural aversion to creatures that prone to stinging, pinching [ugh!], biting, or sucking out their victim’s juices.
So if insects were scaled-up (ignoring the physical limitations of exoskeletons here) to the size of other mammals, with the largest insects being comparable in size to the largest land mammals (so say a Goliath Beetle is the size of an elephant), what would be particularly dangerous to us as a species?
I’d say pretty much all of them . There seems to be a lot more competition among insects, and their world seems like a pretty viscious, brutal one in which everybody is busy munching (or parasitising) each other. I’m wondering where we’d fit into that kind of ecosystem…harvesting sugar for the Giant Ant Queen?
If you’ve ever seen the video of a few Japanese Giant Hornets taking on a bee hive with a 1000-1 number disadvantage, you know that this beast must be up there. They are already the size of your thumb and spray poison in addition to their painful sting and crushing mandibles. And how about non-insects, like a 9" poisonous centipede or giant bird-hunting spider blown up to the size of a mastodon? How do you choose just one?
Ants. Pretty much every non-vegetarian insect could kill you if it was bigger, but ants are so numerous and well organised that if they were supersized they would rule the world. Of course, this ignores various practical problems which in reality mean ants never would be supersized…
I think they already do that. Aren’t they pretty much everywhere? Haven’t they been around for a very, very, long time? Aren’t there trillions of them on the planet?
That’s what I came in to say. You can’t simply scale an ant up to elephant size, it’s spindley legs would not support it. Bosda mentioned the breathing problem. Insects don’t actually have lungs, they have a tracheal breathing system, which does not scale well. The largest insects ever to exist were dragonflies with wingspans of over 20 inches, and about as heavy as a crow. However, they lived back in the Carboniferous period, about 300 million years ago. It is thought that the oxygen content of the atmosphere was much higher at that time, 30-35% instead of 20% today, allowing them to breathe.
the OP specifically ruled out the practical problems of real world physics etc to focus on their abilities instead. are the finalists the ants and the wasps? would you rather be enslaved by the endless horde of militant ants or impregnated by the flying Aliens?
Are wasps and hornets in the same class? Because my money is still on the Giant Hornet. If we include non-insects, I wonder where the giant centipede would fall. Ants do have a numerical and organizational advantage though, and are worthy contenders, but then we need to look at the strengths and weaknesses of different types of ants.
. There seems to be a lot more competition among insects, and their world seems like a pretty viscious, brutal one in which everybody is busy munching (or parasitising) each other. I’m wondering where we’d fit into that kind of ecosystem…harvesting sugar for the Giant Ant Queen?