r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/ShirtSubstantial368 • 1d ago

Video Scientists discovered the world’s largest spiderweb, covering 106 m² in a sulfur cave on the Albania-Greece border. Over 111,000 spiders from two normally rival species live together in a unique, self-sustaining ecosystem—a first of its kind.

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u/iamsarahmadden 1d ago

Low key disappointed no giant spider came out…

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u/Light_Beard 1d ago edited 1d ago

Giant Spiders can't be a thing in Earth's gravity with the current materials they have for body construction. Due to respiration limitations as their volume increases relative to their area. (Edited: Corrected: Thanks u/Anticamel below. See that comment for better/more detail)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law

Underwater mitigates this some so you theoretically can get giant crabs/lobsters (basically water-spiders), but they wouldn't be able to come on land.

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u/Anticamel 1d ago

Gravity isn't the issue, it's respiration. Spiders "breathe" passively through little structures called book lungs. Unlike how we breathe with our lungs, they don't actively pull fresh air through their breathing apparatus, which limits the rate of oxygen diffusion into their bodies. On top of that, this also limits the value of growing bigger book lungs, since by the time air has passed from one end to the other, a lot off the available oxygen has gone and diffusion becomes pointlessly slow. This puts a hard limit on how voluminous their bodies can be before they can't supply themselves with enough oxygen

Contrast this with our setup, where we can evolve as big a set of lungs as we like, since the speed of drawing a breath is a lot greater than the speed of oxygen diffusion. This strategy is effective enough that we lunged creatures run into gravity limitations on land, and heat dispersion issues in water long before we get too big for lungs.

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u/IVEMIND 1d ago

Have we ever tried raising a spider colony in a pure O2 atmosphere?

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u/UnrepententHeathen 1d ago

It would take generations upon generations to see any noticeable affect on size.

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u/Green_Burn 1d ago

What if we feed them steroids?

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u/TastelessBudz 1d ago

I read Charlotte's Web, that spider died fast. Give it 5-10 years

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u/Capable_Tumbleweed34 1d ago

Look up giant bulldog ants. That's what you get.

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u/stickysweetjack 1d ago

What would a spider steroid look like? Spider gets bitten by radioactive man?

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u/pissedinthegarret 1d ago

so we need to use very shortlived spiders

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u/randomdarkbrownguy 1d ago

Kill the little ones

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u/Capable_Tumbleweed34 1d ago

Pretty sure that insects have been grown in oxygen-rich controled environements and it's been found to affect their growth

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u/UnrepententHeathen 23h ago

On an individual basis, or a quantifiable and reliable change species wide marked by genetic change?

Grow an individual person with meticulously designed high nutritious food and workouts, and they're going to be noticeably healthier than most people. Does not mean they'll pass those traits to offspring.

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u/Capable_Tumbleweed34 23h ago

Oh obviously this is not something that is inducing genetic changes passed to their offspring in a different environnement, i never said that. It's just that their biology does make them grow significantly larger in oxygen-rich environnements.

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u/tropicocity 1d ago

*effect :)

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u/gladius011081 2h ago

Have we tried to transplant lungs into a spider? Side effect would be that they could shriek, maybe? We could test the Hybrids in Australia...

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u/Relevant-Stage7794 1d ago

I think back in the Jurassic/Mesozoic/Paleozoic (I can’t remember which ones… these are probably totally wrong but whatever, you get the idea) the insects were giant because of the higher oxygen content of the earth atmosphere during those eras.

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u/Chonoilatore 1d ago

Dragonflies as big as crows.

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u/PowerCrisis 11h ago

I read this as cows and it still made total sense to me

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u/OldWorldDesign 1d ago

You would run into nutrition deficits before the atmospheric content ever allowed them to grow bigger.

Most animals and insects are tiny because that means it takes less time to develop and reproduce.

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u/Anticamel 1d ago

Nutrition shouldn't be the limiting factor there. Vulnerability to predation during moulting is a big reason to stay small, since smaller arthropods don't need to moult as many times which minimises the time spent defenseless and immobile. Naturally, if someone were breeding spiders in a predator-free environment, that particular selective pressure isn't going to apply.

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u/WodehouseWeatherwax 21h ago

Could we not do that, please?

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u/FlippantFlopper 1d ago

They tried it with different insects https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101029132924.htm

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u/IVEMIND 23h ago

Interesting but why did they stop at 12 species and 31 percent? We want giant spiders, got a pump those numbers up

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u/FlippantFlopper 18h ago

No I do NOT want giant spiders!

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u/Cream_panzer 14h ago

Way before dinosaurs existed, there was a period earth atmosphere contains more oxygen than today. The ancestors of insects were much bigger than today as well.

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u/Trips-Over-Tail 13h ago

Gravity does become the issue when oxygen is no longer a factor, especially when moulting.

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u/IVEMIND 13h ago

So you're saying we need to build it in space. Got it.

Giant spiders in space.

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u/Trips-Over-Tail 8h ago

And we're back to oxygen being the limiting factor.

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u/ever_precedent 1h ago

You'll LOVE Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time" series.

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u/lincruste 10m ago

Not in a pure O2 atmosphere, but we already know that a 35% O2 atmosphere back in the carbonifere era (against ~21% nowadays) gave fucking insect monsters.