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Oxygen, thermal limits, and insect gigantism
Topic Started: Jul 31 2017, 12:55 PM (273 Views)
IIGSY
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A huntsman spider that wastes time on the internet because it has nothing better to do
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http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0022610
Projects
Punga: A terraformed world with no vertebrates
Last one crawling: The last arthropod

ARTH-6810: A world without vertebrates (It's ded, but you can still read I guess)

Potential ideas-
Swamp world: A world covered in lakes, with the largest being caspian sized.
Nematozoic: After a mass extinction of ultimate proportions, a single species of nematode is the only surviving animal.
Tri-devonian: A devonian like ecosystem with holocene species on three different continents.

Quotes


Phylogeny of the arthropods and some related groups


In honor of the greatest clade of all time


More pictures


Other cool things


All African countries can fit into Brazil
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TAXESbutNano
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I'm going back to basics.
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TLDR; Large size may evolve in arthropods as a resistance to oxygen poisoning, and arthropods with aquatic stages are more vulnerable to said oxygen poisoning.
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kusanagi
Adolescent
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Did arthropleurids have an aquatic stage then?
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HangingThief
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ghoulish
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kusanagi
Jul 31 2017, 01:10 PM
Did arthropleurids have an aquatic stage then?
Assuming they were generally terrestrial, no. Probably not.


Personally I don't buy the idea that oxygen levels are a constraint on arthropod size. If they needed to grow bigger, they would develop a more active respiratory system.
Hey.


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Nyarlathotep
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The Creeping Chaos
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There's also the case of Jaekelopterus, the largest known arthropod of all time, which lived in the early Devonian when oxygen levels were lower than they are today. I think lack of competition from vertebrates helped them in that context.
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Joe99
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Zygote
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i feel like all the large athropod growth that happened during the time was more due to niche partitoning over just more oxygen
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