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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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Ask Lemmy
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A lion sized ant would asphyxiate rather quickly. Breathing through spiracles/tracheae doesn't scale well.
And the lions would quickly get too cold by having way too much surface area.
Scientific accuracy is no fun for shrinking and growing things.
The smallest mammal (Etruscan shrew) is about the same size as the largest ant (Driver ant Queen). You probably need to speed up the tiny-lion metabolism, but in general the mammal body plan can work around that size.
On the other hand, to scale up insects to the size of a lion, you would need to completly redesign the respiratory at least and the entire exoskeleton construct will also be pushed to it's structural limits.
Downscaling mammals is much more realistic then upscaling arthropods.
But there were giant ants during the Eocene
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanomyrma
For the sake of argument, let's assume a hyper-rich oxygen environment.
Yeah well... "giant" ants still aren't lion sized. Or even cat size. Perhaps "oh wow that's a big ant" big, but not actually that... big.