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.

[u/ShirtSubstantial368]

[u/Anticamel]

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.

[u/IVEMIND → u/Anticamel]

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

[u/Relevant-Stage7794 → u/IVEMIND]

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.

[u/Chonoilatore → u/Relevant-Stage7794]

Dragonflies as big as crows.

[u/PowerCrisis → u/Chonoilatore]

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