View Single Post
Old 10-09-2003, 04:06 PM   #12 (permalink)
giblfiz
is a shoggoth
 
Location: LA
Quote:
Originally posted by Orodinn
Small animals are stronger proportionally to their size, but an ant the size of a dog wouldnt necessarly be stronger than a dog. In fact, I dont even know if their legs could hold their weight.

Say for example you take a muscle and make it 2 time bigger. The muscle is going to be 4 times as powerful. BUT, its weight is going to increase by a factor of 8. So bigger animals are very impressive, but most bigger animals would have a very hard time lifting something of their own weight. Dont expect ants to be able to lift 50 times their own weight (like they can now) if they were as big as dogs.
Orodinn and all the nay-sayers are right.
Without getting into all of the problems with big ant's specificly the general idea doesn't work. Ants are succsessfull because they are small. They gain a lot of advantages from being small, like low food requiremtns and great relitive strength. If big ants were very effective creatures we would already have something along that line, the evolutionary nitch would be more or less filled.
Wow, I'm just dictating rather than making an argument. how un-me like.

well why don't I leave the argument as an exsersize for the reader.
__________________
Use the star one and you'll be fighting off the old ones with your bare hands
-A Shoggoth on the Roof
giblfiz is offline  
 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76